Brown on back foot in Europe

Gordon Brown likes to think of himself as above anyone else when it comes to dealing with world of finance. A few years ago, he was late for a meeting with policy wonks in the Treasury and chortled condescendingly that he had just come off the phone with the fifth French Finance Minister in five years. The point was clear: while the French have no stability at their financial top, Labour had in Britain guaranteed a better way of economic management.

All the more interesting, therefore, that as the financial markets tumble down it is France, not Britain, which has taken the lead in calling for a financial crisis summit on how to reform the financial system. There may be no reason for the pan-European fund French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde has talked about, but it is certainly worth discussing the idea given the problems created by European governments bailing out only “their” banks in what is a fundamentally international market. (In fact, the Irish government is already considering a request to include the Royal Bank of Scotland – which has 280 branches in the Republic - in the guarantee issued to Irish banks).

In all fairness, Gordon Brown has probably been working behind the scenes and when European leaders get together they are bound to weigh his words carefully. But, as a former European foreign minister told me last week, after haranguing Europeans for years because of their sluggish economic growth and unwillingness to instigate the necessary market reforms, few will be in a mood to hear any lectures. Britain is about to hit a recession and the days when the then-Chancellor could tell European finance ministers they needed to learn from the UK's economic strategy to improve their own performance, as he did in November 2003, are decidedly over.

Why is this important? Because of the Prime Minister’s two-pronged line of attack on the Tories, which holds that a) only he has the experience to lead Britain through the economic storm; and b) he is the one with the international contacts and intellectual perspective to sharpen the multilateral response – and Europe's role – amid the Wall Street debacle.

But whilst David Cameron has batted the first volley back over the net at this week’s party conference with an Obama-style “judgment not experience is what matters” argument, French President Nicolas Sarkozy has shown that others are as well-placed to develop the necessary international solutions to the current crisis as Britain’s Economist-in-Chief. It does not address the charge, leveled by former Europe Minister Denis MacShane at the Tories that their Europe policy will leave Britain isolated, but it shows that the Labour government is far from being at the core of Europe.