Brown’s nemesis awaits — and his name is Brian

Who will finally sit Gordon Brown down with a bottle of whisky, a loaded revolver and a copy of his own book on courage, and tell him the game is up? You might imagine the task would fall to Jack Straw, flanked by a couple of union bosses. In fact, it’s more likely to be three men you’ve never heard of: Frank Gill, Arnaud Mares and Brian Coulton.

Working respectively for the ratings agencies Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s and Fitch, this trio have the job of deciding whether the UK can pay back the hundreds of millions of pounds Brown’s government is borrowing every day through the gilts market in order to keep afloat. One day soon, it may be their job to declare that it can’t. ‘Britain should lose its triple-A rating,’ said Stuart Thomson, a bond fund manager at Ignis Asset Management, which has £70 billion under its control.