Turning Brown’s happier mood against him

George Osborne’s piece in the Evening Standard today marks a stepping up in the Tory rhetoric on the financial crisis. Osborne ends with this line directed at Gordon Brown, “You presided over the biggest economic disaster of our lifetime and we will not let you forget it.”

But in the short term, perhaps, the most effective Tory attack is the idea that Brown’s apparent enjoyment of this crisis is unseemly. Osborne frames the charge thus:

“to regard today as a triumph, as some in government seem to do, is bizarre. And it misjudges the public mood. For this is no triumph. It is a necessary but desperate last-ditch attempt to prevent catastrophe.”