The Brown full circle-

A must read in this week's Spectator as Tom Bower takes a look at 20 years of Gordon Brown.

It's an excellent piece which show how the Prime Minister has come full circle since his interventiion in the 1988 debate with the then Chancellor Nigel Lawson

In the midst of a withering attack against Nigel Lawson’s management of the faltering economy, the Labour front bencher pierced the Tory’s façade with deadly accuracy: ‘This is a boom based on credit.’ Labour MPs frenziedly cheered as Brown artfully mocked the forlorn-looking Chancellor for allowing consumption to spiral out of control and for offering consistently wrong forecasts. The Chancellor’s boast about his ‘sound management of the economy,’ scoffed Brown, was worthless. ‘Most of us would say that the proper answer is to keep the forecasts and discard the Chancellor.’ That evening’s newspaper headline intoxicated the aspiring Scotsman: ‘veteran chancellor bloodied by upstart’

Sounds familiar doesn't it?

and according to Bowers

To travel full circle within 20 years from scorning ‘Lawson’s Boom’ to masterminding ‘Brown’s Bust’ is probably unrivalled in modern British history. Just as Thatcher was harmed by her misquoted phrase, ‘there’s no such thing as society’, Brown’s damnation of ‘the age of irresponsibility’ was uttered by a confused socialist psychologically unprepared for his nemesis. Deriding all the warnings of an impending recession,