Gordon Brown finds a personal anthem for the G20 summit
If Gordon Brown had been looking for a personal anthem that could have been played as he entered the G20 summit in Washington yesterday, he needn't have searched further than the song by the reggae singer Shaggy - It Wasn't Me.
Who insisted he'd ended boom and bust? It wasn't me. The chancellor during a decade of growth and nothing saved for the downturn? Wasn't me. Who put in place a system of financial policing which failed at the first crisis? It wasn't me.
Instead, with Brown increasingly seeing himself as the hybrid heir to John Keynes and Franklin Roosevelt all rolled into a "global saviour for a global era", perhaps Sinatra's My Way, played throughout the entire Washington gathering, would have been equally fitting.
What under normal circumstances should be dismissed as delusional off-the-scale grandeur is instead being peddled and reinforced by Number 10, which remains content that Brown no longer sees his authority confined to UK sovereign territory.
The G in G20, so goes the delusion, stands for Gordon, who, as the world's newly self-appointed chancellor, simply summoned those less informed and less economically enlightened than himself for a weekend seminar on global fiscal escapology. The prime minister's opinion is now so sacrosanct and worthy that he urges the world's infirm and struggling nations to leave their sick beds and follow him and his remedy of co-ordinated international tax cuts. Nations must heed his prophecies about the need for urgent action now to prevent the global economy sliding deeper into recession; and must accept his teachings, his four-point plan based on the efficacy of fiscal stimulus that will lead everyone in Washington this weekend out of the dark and back to their promised lands of plenty.
Prophets generally need a succinct, catchy message and what was originally wheeled out as an it-wasn't-all-my-fault excuse for the media at the beginning of the crisis has suddenly become Brown's global mantra, his summary prayer. He used it in New York before heading to Washington. Listen, he will use it again and again: "This is a global problem that requires a global solution."
Should anyone ask why, as the captain responsible for a ship sinking, he should be seeking global praise and a new worldwide fan base for announcing he has re-invented the life-jacket, the wait for any acceptable answer will be a long one. As David Cameron now regularly finds out during his weekly one-on-one at Prime Minister's Questions, Brown doesn't do answers.
For New Brown, just like New Labour, the Commons is not enough. Brown in New York said "protectionism was the road to ruin" and he warned the arriving leaders of the G20 that they had to look to long-term reform, rather than quick fixes. It's no longer about just making the UK government work, it is about making "governments" work, about seeking global progress.
While the chancellor, Alistair Darling, is polishing the economic sophistry required to sell his pre-budget report next week, Brown is shores away tending to his new global flock, telling them they need a "route map" back to prosperity, and how they can secure the future of the new global age. Underpinning the route map for the Gordon20 in Washington are the gospels according to Adam, David, John and Paul; that's Adam Smith from Kirkcaldy (pictured above), the 18th-century author of the Wealth of Nations; David Ricardo, the 19th-century classical economist who decoded the mathematics of international free trade; John Maynard Keynes, of course, and Paul Krugman, the new Nobel economics laureate who believes Brown really is the messiah of the financial world.
For Krugman, four Nobel truths have sprung forth from Brown's teachings and have to be followed like commandments. Weaknesses were exposed during the international credit crunch crisis and these weaknesses need to be addressed quickly by reform; fiscal stimulus, not the teachings of Henry or Ben (Paulson and Bernanke of the US Treasury and the US Federal Reserve) is the way forward; rich countries need to pump more money into the International Monetary Fund; and, if Brown hasn't yet codified the fourth truth, he soon will because that's what saviours do.
In selling Brown as the new global saviour, Downing Street probably can't believe their luck at discovering a Brown bounce was out there. Prior to the financial crisis in June this year, Brown and his Labour government were languishing 20 points behind the Conservatives. His ratings were as low as any UK PM had ever sunk to. Brown was a failing prime minister and failing party leader who looked unlikely to survive much past this Christmas. He was leading an accident-prone administration who were being steered by economic events that looked outside their control. The false prophet who had "ended" boom and bust looked a faintly ridiculous figure, one promoted way beyond his abilities. Labour were on a long walk to oblivion come the next general election.
And now? Suddenly, we have the Miracle of the Crisis, with Brown arisen and his fortunes partially recovered with polls suggesting he's within six points of the Tories. There's either a paradox of political crisis, where the worse it gets, the better it gets for Number 10, or Brown finds himself in a unique position that can't last.
If it's the latter, the inauguration of Barack Obama on January 20 may well mark a return to normality. George Bush's lame duck administration left the US Treasury looking weak, the Fed looking inept, and when the US most needed a smart president, they found themselves with Homer Simpson in the White House.
Brown's adoption of the bank recapitalisation model that was successfully used by Sweden in the early 1990s suddenly made him look economically authoritative, a quality that couldn't be found in Washington even if the CIA and the FBI had been out looking. The vacuum that Brown is filling at the moment will begin to end when Obama announces who his treasury secretary will be, and will close completely when Obama himself formally becomes president on January 20.
If Brown's economic delusions continue past this point, and his church of the latter-day Keynesians is still out there seeking global recruits, only the opinion polls will tell us if this trick is continuing to work. To be successful, the Miracle of the Crisis will have to take Brown all the way to a general election. And that may be sooner than many of us are currently prepared to predict.
