Brown and the IMF: no lessons learned

Was Gordon Brown campaigning for the IMF job or wasn’t he? Did he want it or didn’t he? The answer to both questions is an emphatic ‘Yes’ – but  this was a position kept below the barricades.

Brown simply would not openly declare himself and go for the job in open and vigorous  competition with all comers.

This is all of a piece with the spoiled boy that is our former Prime Minister. He has always wanted to be annointed, to be an entitled inevitability rather than a winner. All winners know they may be losers and are prepared to take that risk. Brown has never had that particular courage.

He avoided competition by internal strongarming in his party (carried out by others, of course) and was therefore simply raised unopposed to the Labour Leadership and, consequently, to the Prime Ministership – an inherited role he lost in election at the first time of asking.

The country never respected this avoidance of contest. But Brown has clearly learned no lessons from the undoubted trauma of rejection at the polls and by the Liberal Democrats, both of which he took for granted.

Now he has not been prepared to declare himself for the IMF job – in case he didn’t get it.

The British Government, through the Foreign Secretary, has let it be known that Brown never gave them any indication, even informally, that he wanted the job.

This cannot be offerd as the reason the British Government has not supported him for the post. They have taken  a lot of stick for alleged pettiness in not doing so but we see it as a stand against the discredited ‘jobs for the boys’ or ‘Buggins’ turn’ way of doing these things.

Gordon Brown himself, on what may have been his last major action as Prime Minister, showed the nation -  and Europe – the diseased end of that particular form of patronage.

He forced through, as the British nominee for the important post of the European Union’s first ever Foreign Minister, the appointment of the utterly and embarrassingly unable Baroness Cathy Ashton, a Labout peripheral already lodged in the Brussels gravy train.

What Cameron and Osborne are saying is that, sad as it is  – but earned – Gordon Brown’s recent record in the Treasury, in failing adequately to regulate  the financial institutions, makes him an inappropriate choice for this job at this time. And they are right.

Those who support Brown – and whose personal loyalty we applaud if we cannot share their judgment – rack on about his record for prudence and his work in ‘saving the world’ from the collapse of the banks, but conveniently  ignore a critical fact which should not be buried.

When the pressure was on in the Autumn of 2008, Gordon Brown was dangerously indecisive. When Icesave was going down, first he would not guarantee people’s savings in it. Its stock fell. Then he would offer a guarantee – but only to a minor level. It stock fell. Then he had another bite at the cherry…

A single, immediate, authoritative guarantee pitched with a sense of realism of the situation, would have saved additional money from being lost in the dither.

So let’s hear no more of the party political bleating about the ‘mean minded UK Government’ and ‘the personal grudges’. Brown is the wrong man at the wrong time.

And the Tories, more than most, have reason to be grateful to him, rather then begrudge him. If he hadn’t been so bad they wouldn’t be where they almost are. The 2010 General Election was a vote against more than a vote for.