And most of all, it would get the electorate into the
Politics
Fraser Nelson reviews the week in politics
Given that Gordon Brown spent his adult life plotting to get into 10 Downing Street, he has been understandably quiet about his decision to leave it. Tony Blair’s old office certainly brought him rotten luck, and his new open-plan base in Number 12 has far better feng shui for a man of his disposition. There he sits as the leader of the gang, within stapler-hurling distance of about a dozen aides. It looks and feels like a general election campaign headquarters, the environment in which, historically, Mr Brown has been at his happiest and most deadly. He is already at war.
For the second time in his career momentum is behind him, as unexpected as it is undeserved. Mr Brown’s audacity, his most remarkable characteristic, is serving him well. Here stands the architect of Britain’s debt pyramid and its inept banking regulation system posing as the solution to the problems he himself incubated. The sheer chutzpah which allowed him to pose as a world financial leader at the G20 in Washington may well take him through to the Pre-Budget Report on Monday, applying a triumphant Keynesian spin to what is an abject budgetary failure.
With each of the Prime Minister’s gravity-defying successes, the likelihood of a January election grows stronger. It would be an extraordinary time for an election, yet that very singularity would play to Mr Brown’s favoured theme: namely, that there is a national economic emergency. Even in the depths of winter, he could easily argue that he needed a new and explicit five-year mandate to implement his rescue plan. And most of all, it would get the electorate into the polling booths before the really bad news breaks.
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