Despite the Olympic euphoria, there is growing pessimism about the short-term prospects of the British economy. The new orthodoxy is that Britain is too sickly to be cured by a short-term fix; policy should concentrate on bringing about sustainable long-term growth.

 

This rules out an immediate boost to public spending and swings the debate to the more familiar territory of the causes of Britain's relative economic decline, with the right pressing for freer markets and a reduction in the size of the state, and the left rediscovering the virtues of industrial policy.

 

But there is no need to place the short run and the long run in such dramatic opposition. Britain faces both a short-run problem of deficient demand and a long-term problem

The phrase "horses for courses" is as valid for politics as for other activities. It's as impossible to think of Gordon Brown at the recent Fifa meeting in Zurich pleading England's cause for the World Cup as it is to imagine David Cameron expounding the nitty-gritty of capital adequacy ratios at a meeting of the G20. When the economic crisis erupted in 2008-9, Brown, like Churchill in 1940, was the right man in the right place at the right time. He'd had 10 years as chancellor of the exchequer. He'd read widely and thought deeply about economics, finance, globalisation. He was the one national leader who came to the crisis with a plan and the authority to push it through.

 

This is his story of how he did it, told soberly, clearly,