Not content with saving us poor souls in Britain, our Dear Leader now wants to save the world – and says so in tomorrow’s Times. He is demanding that other dithering countries copy his bold plan. It’s become the major theme of Saving Private Gordon – that the rest of the world will be inspired by the Dear Leader and show their love for him by adopting a similar bank recapitalisation scheme.
Brown has mentioned the international element of this so often that I have started to smell a large, whiskered rat and I’d like to run a theory past CoffeeHousers. Gerard Baker tells us that the G7 had been talking about a co-ordinated response to the financial crisis. Originally the G7 wanted to announce the 50bps interest rate cut at their meeting in Washington this weekend. But their central banks (all nominally independent) wouldn’t play ball and wanted an independent Wednesday announcement. Now, might the G7 nations also have discussed a co-ordinated bank recapitalisation? If so then the embattled Brown could break ranks and announce his before the rest of them – allowing him to falsely claim that everyone is following his bright idea.
PS Deliciously, Baker says Brown was phoned by George W Bush on Tuesday and told to take his finger out – not an image our Dear Leader would welcome. But the £50bn bailout was already on the table then. We know this as the story was broken not by Robert Peston but by my former colleague Bill Jamieson of The Scotsman. He had the £50bn bailout story by the time the first edition hit the street at 11pm on Monday evening.
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