Tonight:
5°c
ACCORDING to his extraordinary I-pay-tribute-to-myself article in yesterday's Sunday Mirror, Gordon Brown is all but single-handedly guiding the planet to salvation. "While this is a world financial crisis that has started from America, Britain will lead the way in pulling through," wrote Helmsman Gordon.
Mr Brown is also, it seems, saving something even more important than the world the Labour Government.
At prime minister's questions last week, the great statesman couldn't resist a cheap dig at the Tories for policies on the City which, as far as I can see, have been identical to his own. Based on a soaraway two-point bump in the opinion polls, one Brown-supporting MP told the Evening Standard: "This could be our Falklands War."
Mr Brown is doing the right things economically. But in political terms, his, and Labour's, triumphalism is reckless. His bank recapitalisation plan has yet to work. If this is a new Falklands, the event popularly (if wrongly) supposed to have rescued Margaret Thatcher, Labour is declaring victory before the Task Force has even reached Gibraltar.
And in practice, it is nothing of the sort. In the Falklands, the outcome was swift and clear. But in this crisis, even if the recapitalisation goes well, we will not soon "pull through".
It is true that, just like Gordon, the British love crises though we are better at concealing our pleasure than him. We love feeling firm in the face of terrorism, sturdy against striking Tube drivers. But these days, I have a feeling that we prefer our crises brief, minor and not affecting us too directly, thanks.
As yet, most of us are not directly affected. Life continues strangely as before. The restaurants remain full, the shops busy. But that will soon change. Years of tax increases and spending cuts lie ahead. And when they happen, it seems unlikely that Gordon will escape blame because he will be imposing them.
This week's premature declaration of success will come to be seen as a companion piece with his earlier claims to have "put the public finances on a sound footing" and "ended boom and bust".
Even yesterday, Brown brazenly wrote of having "reduced government debt over the last 10 years" this from a man who ran up deficits when the economy was growing at three per cent.
The pain in the public services will be all the greater for the fact that they became, under Brown, subsidy junkies, increasing their spending out of all proportion to the improvements they delivered.
True, the media, ever febrile, likes Gordon again (one famous lady columnist has now, hilariously, done her third handbrake turn on him in 18 months). But in the opinion polls that have caused this burst of Labour optimism, the party is still 10 to 12 points behind; yesterday's showed Mr Brown was judged to be doing badly as Prime Minister by a 34-point margin, and to be handling the financial crisis badly by 37 per cent of voters, against 29 per cent who say he is doing well.
And true, the perhaps more important polling trend is modestly in Labour's favour. But the most interesting statistic in the latest poll is the 34 per cent of voters who, when asked how the PM was doing in the crisis, said neither well nor badly, or that they didn't know.
That's the answer I'd have given until the past few days. I didn't how this would turn out. I still don't know how it will turn out for the world but now, after his typically clunky attempts to make trivial party-political capital of something so important and uncertain, I fear it will turn out badly for Gordon.
Hendy extends his hand
TO the Standard's London Influentials party at the Wallace Collection, where the crowd was rather different from last year. Many of the paper's very oldest friends, such as Ken and Lee Jasper, could sadly no longer be with us. One of the few Livingstone-era survivors, transport commissioner Peter Hendy, even deigned, for the first time, to shake my hand. What a difference 12 months makes.
Another nice little earner
As we contemplate a future of buying all our cars second-hand and getting all our consumer durables off the backs of lorries, ITV has just the show. It's bringing back Minder, the Eighties classic of West London, cash-only duckers-and-divers, with Shane Richie and Lex Shrapnel as the old Arfur and Terry combo. Dodgy geezers for dodgy times: what better TV revival could there be?
