Brown’s reputation for economic competence has gone. The Tories should seize the chance

It was easy to forget during Gordon Brown’s trip to India and China that he has actually been Prime Minister since June. His speeches were filled with export targets and trade deals, barely distinguishable from the rhetoric he deployed as Chancellor. This is deliberate. Mr Brown makes no claim to be a suave statesman (a reality he inadvertently reinforced by stumbling over a red carpet in Delhi). Abroad, as at home, he bills himself as the hardworking guardian of prosperity. His entire premiership is based upon the supposedly sturdy pillar of economic stability.

This is why the turmoil to which Mr Brown returned on Tuesday morning could be as damaging to him as the problems which greeted the tanned Jim Callaghan on his return from the Guadeloupe arms summit in 1979. Mr Brown did not ask ‘Crisis? What crisis?’ (That was the headline: Callaghan’s words were actually ‘I don’t think other people in the world would share the view [that] there is mounting chaos’).