Economic recovery plan? Forget it, Gordon

The Prime Minister’s survival is pinned on a September ‘relaunch’ to ease the voters’ economic woes. But, says Martin Vander Weyer, each door through which Brown tries to escape his predicament slams in his face. His room for manoeuvre is negligible

All this talk of Gordon Brown’s ‘economic recovery plan’ calls to mind the unhappy day, many years ago on a junior bankers’ training course, when I took part in a competitive team game which involved managing a computer model of the British economy.

We were told it was a version of the Treasury’s own model. In successive rounds, each team would have the opportunity to alter tax rates, interest rates and public spending levels, the objective being to maintain strong growth, low inflation and low unemployment. But also in each round, the game’s moderator would introduce random events with economic consequences: a sudden rise in oil prices, say, or a wave of public-sector strikes, or the outbreak of a small war.

Before the game began, my teammates went into a huddle. ‘You’re a clever bugger, Martin,’ one of them said. ‘We think you’d better be captain.’ So off we went, with me calling most of the shots. Two rounds in, we were looking pretty good: prudent and stable, you might say. But five or six rounds in, what with oil prices soaring and one thing and another, we were in deep trouble. Stagflation loomed. Public borrowing seemed to be irretrievably out of control. Our dole queue was lengthening. Attempts to correct past mistakes only made matters worse. The team began to mutter and squabble. We lost the game and for the rest of the month-long course my clever-bugger status never recovered.

I haven’t made that up: it took place in 1982 at a training centre in Sussex which is now a luxury hotel, and I can still recall the burning resentment of one colleague who felt, probably correctly, that he would have done a far better job than me as captain.