The Spectator’s Notes | 28 February 2009

On Monday I read that Gordon Brown was about to launch a ‘£500 billion bank gamble’. By the time you read this, he may have done so, but it is quite possible that few will have noticed, or cared. These colossal expenditures or promises of expenditures or of possibilities of expenditure have become the same as most government initiatives under New Labour — designed for the headline, and then reannounced from time to time. They are like the victories in the permanent war between the super-powers constantly trumpeted in Nineteen Eighty-Four — apparently enormous, but semi-fictional. To understand what is happening, one must remember that, as in a real war, the main participants are permanently exhausted. How could they possibly remember what they decided last week, or have time to implement much of it? One of the most able civil servants trying to sort everything out is Tom Scholar, the Treasury man who handles the ‘tripartite’ (Bank, Treasury, FSA) arrangement.