Thank goodness we can have a run on the pound when we need one

Martin Vander Weyer looks ahead to next week’s Pre-Budget Report and reflects on George Osborne’s contentious remarks about the devaluation of sterling. It looks like Gordon Brown is getting away with his borrowing binge — leaving the Tories isolated

On Monday afternoon I rang a distinguished City economist and asked him a rather technical question about the relationship between issuance of gilt-edged stock and movements in the dollar-sterling exchange rate. ‘Not really my specialist field,’ he replied suavely. ‘But I’ll give you my overview: George Osborne is a prat.’

And that, I’m afraid — expressed with varying degrees of bluntness or circumlocution — was pretty much the consensus of all the experts I spoke to this week about the shadow chancellor’s much-quoted remarks to the Times at the weekend: ‘We are in danger, if the government is not careful, of having a proper sterling collapse, a run on the pound… The more you borrow as a government, the more you have to sell the debt and the less attractive your currency seems.’