Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Brown’s reputation for economic competence has gone. The Tories should seize the chance

Fraser Nelson reviews the week in politics

It was easy to forget during Gordon Brown’s trip to India and China that he has actually been Prime Minister since June. His speeches were filled with export targets and trade deals, barely distinguishable from the rhetoric he deployed as Chancellor. This is deliberate. Mr Brown makes no claim to be a suave statesman (a reality he inadvertently reinforced by stumbling over a red carpet in Delhi). Abroad, as at home, he bills himself as the hardworking guardian of prosperity. His entire premiership is based upon the supposedly sturdy pillar of economic stability.

This is why the turmoil to which Mr Brown returned on Tuesday morning could be as damaging to him as the problems which greeted the tanned Jim Callaghan on his return from the Guadeloupe arms summit in 1979. Mr Brown did not ask ‘Crisis? What crisis?’ (That was the headline: Callaghan’s words were actually ‘I don’t think other people in the world would share the view [that] there is mounting chaos’). But that awful precedent will not have been far from Gordon’s mind as he stepped on the tarmac. The news was plastered over every front page in every city in the world: a stock market meltdown in which serious financiers were talking about a collapse in the world banking system. And this was the ghastly backdrop against which the PM was trying to sell Northern Rock.

The old Brown jinx, which accompanied his calamitous sale of British gold reserves five years ago (at $275 an ounce, against today’s $850 an ounce) was back. Stocks were plunging, house prices falling, investors fleeing and — in about the worst context conceivable — Alistair Darling was in the House of Commons announcing his plan to offload a zombified mortgage bank. The terms are extraordinary: the taxpayer will be liable for the risks while would-be bidders could take almost all the profits.

Once, such a ruse would have worked for Mr Brown.

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