Brown’s Highway to Hell

As Brown left Argentina, he might have thought “at least nothing else can go wrong now.” After all, Dan Hannan had started a Mexican wave of derision with his now-famous speech in Strasbourg; then Brown was introduced in New York as a man who became PM in 2007 “and it was all downhill ever since”; then to Brazil where he was snubbed by Pele and ribbed by the president; then to Chile to be given lessons in Keynsian economics. Then, finally, he learns Cameron will have 60 minutes with Obama – just 5 less than he is due. Thus the scene is set for a farcical G20 next week, and I lay all this out in my News of the World column today.

Set aside the personalities, and there is a rift in how to deal with the probem: is more debt-fuelled spending a good thing? Obama thinks so and so does Brown – but Darling doesn’t and neither does Mervyn King.