At 8pm on Friday, Sky will broadcast an interview with Gordon Brown which seals off what will be his best day for months. The risible idea that he somehow played matchmaker between HBOS and Lloyds TSB proved irresistible to news editors last night. It fuses together the political crisis with the financial one and has been written into the script. Him bumping into the part-time chairman of board of Lloyds (not Eric Daniels, who actually runs the company) has been puffed up into the moment when (as one newspaper put it) Brown ordered banks to merge. It’s the perfect myth, which allows him to say “I’m your man for the economic meltdown.” That’s not to say there were not plenty of political sweeteners in this deal, as James blogged earlier. The banks needed the competition commission to turn a blind eye, and that required political dialogue. But there is all the difference in the world between approving a deal, and brokering it. Yet Brown’s chance meeting with Sir Victor Blank can be puffed into the moment whenThe merger was, as the Lex column says today, a political deal in that the government needed to promise that the Competition Commission would turn a blind eye. But Brown is trying to hype this up into his doing.
As he says tonight’s interview: “The first thing to do is to get the stable economy that we need and that’s the action that we’ve taken in the last day or two.” What action might that be? Simply agreeing somebody else’s action. But Brown knows how to insert himself into a news story.
BROWN: “Obviously in a deal which involves the legislative process, the Government has to be involved, and yes I and Alistair Darling did talk to parties that were involved because it was the right thing to do.
Q: You fixed the deal?
GB – This was a deal that took place between two companies, it involves no government money.
Q – With a little help from the Government
GB – We had to deal with the issues of competition and we had to deal with some of the other issues that flow from that like the maintenance of the mortgage market.Honest answer: No, of course I didn’t fix the deal. Politicians don’t, cant and shouldn’t play matchmaker over corporate mergers of this size. We just have the necessary approval.
Just as Darling gave a Commons statement after the Bank of England’s special liquidity scheme, to make out like it was somehow his doing, Brown and Darling are on the media today to big up their role.Darling had this to say on Sky News: “I was very, very sure “- that’s a first – “that in relation to HBOS we needed to take decisive action and we needed to take it quickly.” And I have to say, it seems to be working. If I were Lloyds, I’d let him – it’s a good thing to have the PM dependent on you for his political survival.
After a successful Budget, Brown’s spin team have been known to go off the boozer and end up face-down in a curry. They deserve to do so today. The myth that Brown played a major role in brokering the HBOS-Lloyds deal has now entered the food chain in Westminster and it will buy him significant amounts of time.
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