What was Brown’s biggest mistake?

“I have to accept my responsibility.” Who would have thought that Gordon Brown would ever breathe those words, let alone breathe them to a conference in America over the weekend? Our former PM has, it’s true, suggested that his regulatory system was inadequate to the financial crash before now. But here he was much more explicit:

“We set up the Financial Services Authority believing the problem would come from the failure of an individual institution. That was the big mistake. We didn’t understand just how entangled things were.”

And that’s event before he got onto the “responsibility” bit. I’ll repeat it, just in case it didn’t sink in the first time:

“I have to accept my responsibility.”

The Telegraph’s James Kirkup has since asked why Brown didn’t issue his mea culpa to Parliament. But we at The Spectator have another question, and it’s one we’d like to throw open to CoffeeHousers: what other mistakes did Brown make? Thing is, all the Ghosts of New Labour now seem to admit that they got banking regulation wrong — yet we rather suspect that they made some other mistakes too. And we also suspect that you might have some ideas, on that front, that you’d care to share.

In which case, just leave your suggestions in the comments thread, and we’ll put them to a vote later this week. It’s a languid sort of a day in Westminster, but if we get a top ten list of Brown’s mistakes out of it, then it can still be a productive one.