Rav Casley Gera

Has Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, saved the world financial system?

… Mr. Brown and Alistair Darling, the chancellor of the Exchequer (equivalent to our Treasury secretary), have defined the character of the worldwide rescue effort, with other wealthy nations playing catch-up.

This is an unexpected turn of events … the British economy is far smaller than the U.S. economy, and the Bank of England doesn’t have anything like the influence either of the Federal Reserve or of the European Central Bank. So you don’t expect to see Britain playing a leadership role.

But the Brown government has shown itself willing to think clearly about the financial crisis, and act quickly on its conclusions. And this combination of clarity and decisiveness hasn’t been matched by any other Western government, least of all our own. [emphasis added]

- Paul Krugman, yesterday. Earlier that day, he won the Nobel Prize for Economics.

What we have here is a Prime Minister who, thanks to his quick thinking, is literally leading the rescue of the world’s financial system; and we want to throw him out of office in favour of an untried kid because, a year ago, he dithered over whether to call an election?

One Labour Prime Minister, two Labour Prime Minister… three….?

It is shortly after sun-rise on Wednesday morning in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in Andalucia. I am in despair at the behaviour of ministers and MPs who were briefing against Gordon Brown once the Glasgow by-election result came in. Then the phone rings. It is the Today programme. Would I like to comment on David Miliband’s article in the Guardian? What article? They send it over on my Blackberry.

It is like a breath of fresh air after the stale self-indulgent solipsism from Warwick. It attacks the Tories. Hooray! It sets out Labour’s mistakes – not under Brown’s brief premiership but strategic wrong turns or failures to get out of first gear since 1997. At last! It suggests that Labour needs to do. On the record. Signed by a senior cabinet minister. About time!

So I tell Today I would like to comment and invite other ministers and MPs top attack the Tories and to discuss ideas and ideology and not personality. Big mistake. The phone goes silent as all the BBC wants from me as a Labour MP is to join in the get-Gordon dance.

pfpfpfpffff. Denis MacShane clearly has his own agenda. But I can’t help but feel there is something completely absurd about the firestorm that’s blown up about Milliband’s article in the Guardian. [Read more →]

Brown’s exhortation to cut food waste, though probably entirely sensible, demonstrates once again how badly his administration lacks the instinct for the mood of the public that served Blair’s so well. Had he said this a year or so ago - when there was actually quite a lot of concern about food being too cheap - it would have appeared prudent, honest and sensible. Now, though, it pricks people’s resentment rather than their guilt, making him seem puritanical and unsympathetic.

UPDATE: Martin Bright agrees with me.