MAIL ON SUNDAY COMMENT: A week that will decide Brown's place in history

He spent ten years as Chancellor reciting his hubristic boast that he had brought 'an end to boom and bust'. He hadn't. He was lucky, and now his luck has run out.

Let down: Stranded tourists will not be hurrying back into Labour's arms

Mr Brown entered Government at a uniquely propitious time for the country's finances. Kenneth Clarke, the last Tory Chancellor, bequeathed an Exchequer in sound health and warmed by increasingly benevolent winds from the global economy. The growth of the internet and the flood of low-cost goods and services from China and India led to an unprecedentedly sustained period of low inflation around the world, allowing interest rates to be slashed.

As Britons binged on the cheap money and pushed housing values to clearly unsustainable levels, our 'prudent' Chancellor sat back and watched.

The most stinging soundbite delivered by David Cameron's Tories is that Mr Brown should have 'fixed the roof while the sun was shining'. His failure to do so - instead, pouring the tax revenues into an ever deepening public-service pit while devoting his Machiavellian energies to unseating Tony Blair - means he has only himself to blame for his bleak position.

Not the last

XL will not be the last high-profile company to go under this autumn: up to 30 airlines are predicted to go bust, previously impregnable financial institutions are teetering on the edge of collapse and hundreds of thousands of workers are facing unemployment in the most serious downturn for a generation.

The Prime Minister's solution? Free loft insulation for pensioners. Even that underwhelming proposal, announced with bathetic fanfare by Downing Street, turned out to have been oversold: only the over-70s and those on benefits would be entitled. Even his own MPs now suspect that he does not have any answers. He blames the same international forces that made his life so easy when he was at the Treasury.

Cameron has seized his moment

A year ago, he had the chance to present his programme and put it to the ultimate test but at the last moment bottled calling an Election. The wobble, prompted by a solitary, headline-grabbing Tory tax policy, is likely to go down as one of the most calamitous misjudgments in political history. If he hadn't lost his nerve, he would almost certainly have been returned to Downing Street --a prospect that now seems unlikely.

David Cameron has seized his moment with poise, confidence and judgment. Doubts remain about the substance of his policies but even his staunchest critics acknowledge that he has now acquired the necessary prime ministerial charisma.

Gordon Brown is facing a week that will determine his place in history. He should tell us how he intends to extract this country from the economic quagmire. If that doesn't quell the current rebellion in his own party, he should, with dignity, face his critics by submitting himself to a leadership election.

And if he is toppled, his successor should go immediately to the country to seek the mandate Gordon Brown failed to secure a year ago.