The book that has the Tories running scared

Last week, a group of academics decided that because of the debt he pumped into the economy and the poison he pumped into the Labour party, Gordon Brown was the third-worst British prime minister since 1945. To which the response from all sane onlookers was: "What, only the third?"

The charge list against him is long enough for a judge to send Labour to a dark cell for years. It would have been grossly negligent for any government to boast that its "light-touch" regulation had "abolished boom and bust", while failing to notice that it was helping push the banking system towards the edge of a cliff. For a Labour government to set aside social democracy's well-merited suspicion of finance capital was truly criminal. The Conservatives and Liberals can now use Brown's failure as a plausible justification for spending cuts and tax rises. The party he left behind is torn by fratricidal strife – real fratricidal strife in the case of the Miliband family.