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It is a recurring foible of politicians that they are far more candid in the speeches they make overseas than they ever seem to be in the set pieces they deliver at home. One would find out far more about what Tony Blair thought on the big issues of the day by reading speeches delivered in Warsaw or Beijing than those used to entertain audiences in Walsall or Basildon.
Likewise, Lord Mandelson, in a speech in New York yesterday, seemed to articulate a matter that is of growing concern here as the Government seeks to tackle the economic crisis, but which no one in the Cabinet seems willing to mention on home turf.
It is that the Government, instead of thinking through carefully what needs to be done, working out how best to do it and making sure it is in a position to implement a plan more or less immediately after it had been announced, is instead dissipating its energy in a blizzard of announcements and initiatives, few of which seem to live up to their promise.
The idea, presumably, is to create the impression of a Government working around the clock and doing everything possible to contain the crisis. Unfortunately, such is the confusion sown by the proliferation of measures that the Government instead risks appearing like a headless chicken, running round in circles without any direction or purpose.
Given the limited amount of time and opportunity there is for decisive action if the recession is to be mitigated, it can ill afford to waste its energy and goodwill in this way.
A desire to over-elaborate, to micro-manage and to produce schemes that were never adequately followed through was a weakness of the Prime Minister when he was Chancellor, and seems to have followed him into his current position. It is high time he learned that such hyperactivity does not fool the electorate for very long. Worse, it then merely breeds disappointment and cynicism.
It is not helped that the economic crisis has become politicised so that every bad economic statistic elicits the mantra that the Government's measures are not working. But that is at least in part the other side of Brown's hyperactive style of government.
If he had spent less time chasing every new idea and more explaining why worthwhile initiatives take a long time to set up and even longer to feed through into the economy, people would by now have a more realistic expectation of how long they should give his measures before forming a judgment on their effectiveness. They would also have more confidence that the Government knows what it is doing. The Prime Minister may not like the message, but Mandelson is right.
Oligarchs down to last $65 billion
A recently developed interest in the fortunes of Russian oligarchs led me to a rich list just published by Finans, a Moscow business magazine, which details in all its brutality just how damaging the credit crunch has been to many of those who were until recently among the world's richest men.
The figures may not all be new but are worth repeating. Top of the casualty list is Oleg Deripaska, whose main asset is Rusal, the world's biggest aluminium company. He has seen his fortune plunge from $40 billion (£28 billion) to $4.5 billion. Rothschild, the London bank, is apparently working on a plan to try to make sure it does not fall any lower.
No one else has done quite as badly, but there are several with losses that can only be described as eye-watering. Vladimir Potanin of Norilsk Nickel is down from $21.5 billion to $5 billion, Mikhail Fridman, who merged his oil company TNK into BP, down from $22 billion to $6.1 billion, and Vladimir Lisin of steel company Novolipetsk down from $23 billion to $7.7 billion.
The top 10 oligarchs have between them lost an amazing $131 billion, or just a mite under two-thirds of their money since 2007. It may not be unprecedented, but it is still amazing that so many of them have been so badly caught out by the credit and commodity price crunch. And none of them was running a bank.
Chelsea fans, meanwhile, can continue to sleep fairly easily. According to this analysis, Roman Abramovich has fared relatively well, with his fortune not even halved, falling from
$23 billion to $13.9 billion.
