Bernard Ingham: Don’t put a misfit like Gordon Brown in charge of the world’s money supply

THINK before you try to answer this conundrum: which has more savvy – the Libyan rebel army or the British Con-Dem coalition?

As things stand, you are just as entitled to bawl “You don’t know what you’re doing” at our so-called government as the Crystal Palace v Scunthorpe crowd were at the referee last Saturday as he doled out nine yellow and two red cards.

And to think we are being asked to vote “Yes” for the Alternative Vote system, which would perpetuate this domestic political ragbaggery!

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If David Cameron and George Osborne allow Gordon Brown to become managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), you can reasonably conclude the body politic has finally lost its marbles.

The test is not what Cameron said yesterday, ahead of the local elections, but what he does tomorrow, when push comes to shove.

For, while Cameron said his predecessor was not the “most appropriate person” to lead the IMF because he would not admit the UK had a “debt problem”, Brown is being advanced as favourite to succeed Dominique Strauss-Kahn to the body that has been overseeing the global financial system since December 1945.

Brown clearly thinks he is eminently suitable since he regards himself as the saviour of the world during the financial crisis that neither he nor the IMF exactly foresaw in 2007.

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It is a fact that, on top of his experience of the highest circles as Prime Minister, he ran the UK economy for a full 10 years. He is by any standards qualified by office, if not necessarily by results, to take over in Washington.

Moreover, he is in sympathy with the IMF’s aims of “fostering global growth and economic stability”. He could even selectively claim some success at the job.

Before we went spectacularly bust, Britain certainly boomed – not a single quarter of economic contraction during his 10 years at the Treasury.

Superficially, Gordon Brown is the man for the IMF when Strauss-Kahn goes off to try to topple Nicolas Sarkozy as president of France.

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Strauss-Kahn has, of course, said that his successor should not, as is customary, be a European. This is because the IMF has vowed to reform itself so that the largest emerging economies – the so-called Brics after Brazil, Russia, India and China – have more influence.

But the Americans, who dominate the organisation, may have other ideas since they seem to regard Brown as a sort of Sir Galahad after his free use of everybody else’s money during the banks’ crash.

Would Cameron and Osborne have a leg to stand on if they came under pressure to accept a Brit – one of their own – as the new MD? Better our profligate man than anybody else’s, many might say.

We may know Brown’s financial capabilities: a £150bn budget deficit. But making Britain itself a candidate for IMF rescue is no disqualification for promotion in this game.

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One of the more depressing aspects of political life is seeing people elevated to the level of their own incompetence as a matter of routine.

So, the moral of this story is that we need something better than fear and loathing to make sure Brown does not inherit the world within the next 12 months.

I have no hesitation in playing the man rather than the ball. The case against Brown is very simple: his nature.

He is, first of all, a gauche, brooding bully. While, like most of them, he can put on a turn, he is seriously deficient in social grace. He was not born to persuade. Under his tutelage, the IMF would likely become as dysfunctional as the Blair/Brown government.

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Second, his fearsome lack of self-confidence demands he demonstrate his innovative brilliance, such as confusingly dividing UK financial regulation. It also requires him to be seen to be right at all times, even if he has just broken the habits of a lifetime by admitting he got the regulation of the financial institutions wrong. This leads to such complications that you need to be a genius to understand his UK tax credit system.

Third, he actually believes in chucking money away. Time and again he sought as Chancellor and PM to throw dollars by the billion at Africa and other places oppressed by appalling dictators with bank accounts in Zurich.

He would be like putty in the hands of those economists who criticise the IMF for its “conditionality” – the conditions it imposes on its advances – for damaging social stability and prolonging poverty. Perhaps that is why he has suddenly emerged as the man to beat for the IMF crown.

Cameron and Osborne will prove conclusively that the coalition is clueless if, while the Libyan rebels disdain Gaddafi’s overtures, they wave the toxic Brown through. They have a cast iron case: “The world can’t afford a misfit at the IMF.”