After visiting Downing Street, Kevin Maguire beats the drum for Brown in today’s Mirror. To spare CoffeeHousers the details about how our PM is “brimming with ideas” and how he puts in “Herculean” 12-hour days, here’s the key passage from towards the end of the article:
“[Brown] hinted that a Treasury forecast of recovery in the second half of 2009 may prove optimistic after the cheating Dickensian Mr Merdles’ of modern finance crashed the economy.”
The growth forecasts in the Pre-Budget Report have been widely condemned as fanciful, and the expectation is that they’ll be sharply downgraded in the next Budget. Of course, the words above are Maguire’s, but they suggest how Team Brown might try to limit the embarrassment that would cause them – namely, by blaming the bankers. Don’t bet against Number Ten coming up with the line that “Further malpractice in the financial sector is only just coming to light, and things are worse than we thought, so we’ve had to readjust our forecasts”.
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