Lagging

Amid the dark clouds of renewed financial chaos which have descended now the markets have decided that a few hundred thousand million in taxpayers' money isn't quite enough for them, and the likelihood that millions of taxpayers will lose their jobs in the near future, there are one or two silver linings. The first is that Gordon Brown, thanks to his consistent support for private profit over public benefit, for PFI over NHS, for bigger airports and renewable uranium over noisy windmills and nasty sustainables and, not least, for war over peace, is unlikely to suffer from fuel poverty in his retirement.

Gordon has done his best to dispense further comforts, even going so far as to dredge up everybody's old favourite about feeling our pain: "Every person who loses their job and the redundancies that are taking place in our country concerns me," he said, in his inimitable failed-English style. In spite of this, the shadow Minister for Forcible Flexibilitisation, Chris "Boot Camp" Graybeing, made some nasty remarks, prompting the present incumbent, Tony "Deep" McNulty, to condemn them as "shallow comment from a shallow man".

The subject of this brilliant debate is Gordon Brown's discovery of a way to "combine his fight against climate change with the need to provide jobs in an economic downturn", as the Guardian and agencies put it. The country's leading liberal newspaper compares Gordon's initiative (training people to install loft insulation) to Roosevelt's New Deal; along with the idea of combining a fight with a need, this surely constitutes encouraging evidence that the characteristic New Labour combination of breathlessness and brainlessness has by no means departed from our political discourse. Even the unpleasant surprise of Gordon's first real experience in boom-and-bust economics has not altogether dampened the mood; I am sure Tony would be proud.