Britannia Radio

The spin goes on and looking at tomorrow's papers Brown has 
hoodwinked a lot of them especially the 'populars' .

As Nelson says it's a "charade"
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SPECTATOR - Coffee House Blog  18.9.08

Brown's charade is working
FRASER NELSON 7:25pm

At 8pm on Friday, Sky will broadcast an interview with Gordon Brown 
which seals off what will be his best day for months. The risible 
idea that he somehow played matchmaker between HBOS and Lloyds TSB 
proved irresistible to news editors last night. It fuses together the 
political crisis with the financial one and has been written into the 
script. Him bumping into the part-time chairman of board of Lloyds 
(not Eric Daniels, who actually runs the company) has been puffed up 
into the moment when (as one newspaper put it) Brown ordered banks to 
merge.

It's the perfect myth, which allows him to say "I'm your man for the 
economic meltdown." That's not to say there were not plenty of 
political sweeteners in this deal. The banks needed the competition 
commission to turn a blind eye, and that required political dialogue. 
But there is all the difference in the world between approving a 
deal, and brokering it. Yet Brown's chance meeting with Sir Victor 
Blank can be puffed into the moment whenThe merger was, as the Lex 
column says today, a political deal in that the government needed to 
promise that the Competition Commission would turn a blind eye. But 
Brown is trying to hype this up into his doing.

As he says in tonight's interview: "The first thing to do is to get 
the stable economy that we need and that's the action that we've 
taken in the last day or two."  What action might that be? Simply 
agreeing somebody else's action. But Brown knows how to insert 
himself into a news story.

BROWN: "Obviously in a deal which involves the legislative process, 
the Government has to be involved, and yes I and Alistair Darling did 
talk to parties that were involved because it was the right thing to do.
Q: You fixed the deal?
GB - This was a deal that took place between two companies, it 
involves no government money.
Q - With a little help from the Government
GB - We had to deal with the issues of competition and we had to deal 
with some of the other issues that flow from that like the 
maintenance of the mortgage market.

Honest answer: No, of course I didn't fix the deal. Politicians 
don't, cant and shouldn't play matchmaker over corporate mergers of 
this size. We just have the necessary approval.

Just as Darling gave a Commons statement after the Bank of England's 
special liquidity scheme, to make out like it was somehow his doing, 
Brown and Darling are on the media today to big up their role.Darling 
had this to say on Sky News: "I was very, very sure "- that's a first 
t- "that in relation to HBOS we needed to take decisive action and we 
needed to take it quickly."     And I have to say, it seems to be 
working. If I were Lloyds, I'd let him - it's a good thing to have 
the PM dependent on you for his political survival.

After a successful Budget, Brown's spin team have been known to go 
off the boozer and end up face-down in a curry. They deserve to do so 
today. The myth that Brown played a major role in brokering the HBOS-
Lloyds deal has now entered the food chain in Westminster and it will 
buy him significant amounts of time.