I feel such a fool, Gordon . You’re a financial genius really

The great economist Keynes said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?”

I remembered this when Gordon B, with one bound, saved the world. All the experts who’d been saying he was bloody useless suddenly decided he was really a financial mastermind because at last he got something right, even if he had it wrong to start with.

“Which experts do you mean, you miserable old curmudgeon?” you ask. Why, the very experts who before they decided he was bloody useless stated with equal certainty that he was a financial titan, a paragon of prudence.

All the world’s statesmen suddenly decided he was genius, too. (They’re the ones who thought the Bliar was brilliant, by the way)

Well, I may be wrong but I am consistent. I always said that slimy Tony was innately dishonest, and I’ve always said Brown was a financial nutcase. And in the paper two nights ago he didn’t let me down.

“Gordon Brown vows to spend his way out of the financial crisis” I read. This means, in English, he is going to spend our money to do so.

This is the money that was sloshing around by the billion before he got hold of it 11 years ago, all of which – and more – has been squandered on schemes to improve the health service, lower the crime rate, better the schools or calm down quarrelsome fanatics in Iraq and Afghanistan. None of them have worked.

Come to think of it, the stock market doesn’t seem to have recovered yet, so maybe he hasn’t saved the world after all.

Mind you he has, to be fair, succeeded gloriously in reducing our pensions – though not those of public servants whom our contributions subsidise. Did you know that, by the way? Yes. They laugh – we pay.

Then I read in the same paper two wonderfully juxtaposed statements.

First, “More public sector jobs will be created.” And – the great bloated haggis’s own words: “The way the economy prospers is by rewarding effort and enterprise.”

We all know what a great contribution to enterprise more public servants will make, don’t we? Just think: they could export great steaming mounds of politically correct bullshit to the waiting markets of the world.

I can see boatloads of it being shovelled onto the waiting wharves in far off places. Ill-written, jargon-clotted manuals on gay and transgendered monitoring will be read gratefully by civic servants in Mumbai. The abstruse skills of rape co-ordination as practiced in the back-streets of the Midlands will be studied avidly in those parts of the Indian Subcontinent or Nigeria where today they do it in such a regrettably random fashion.

Nice one, Gordon. Did you ever think of trying marketing by the way? I know Cameron was in PR, which explains why he’s such weasel. But you’re such a bozo I often wonder whether you wouldn’t do well as, say, marketing director for Barclays. They change them pretty frequently, so maybe they could fit you in. If you just changed all those stupid “Hole-in-the-Wall” signs outside we’d be ever so grateful**

Note to overseas readers. A while ago Barclays Bank hired a new marketing director. You might think his job was to make more more money for them, but his main stroke of genius was to festoon the branches with silly signs which attempted to speak in the “customers’ own language”.

So all the cash machines were renamed Holes in the Wall. How this improved their profits one cannot imagine – I imagine it blew a small hole in them, as it certainly cost a lot of money. I often wonder whether it occurred to him that we like our bankers to talk like bankers, not drunks in a pub.