Gloating is bad form

So, I won't tell anyone if you don't.

It is remarkable to see the Tory getting itself tied up in knots over the economy. Iain Martin writes a most entertaining article in the Torygraph suggesting that little Georgie Osbourne should be moved to a role more in line with his skills. Like looking after the Shadow Cabinet tuck shop.

The Martin article is full of quotable sentences from beginning to end. So choosing one is like shooting fish in a barrel. But here goes with some of my favourite lines:

"There has been," says a loyal Tory MP, "a strange reversal of fortune, in which Gordon Brown focuses on the macro, big picture on the economy and David, the master of theatre, is bogged down with micro initiatives and over-complicated measures of the kind Brown usually specialises in." Osborne as shadow chancellor is blamed for this, because he is most identified with the judgment calls that brought his party here. Then it was Osborne's bad luck that, just as such concerns were stirring, he chose to board a Russian yacht when he would have done far better to remain on dry land.

However, Martin is wrong in this analysis:

One of the Conservative Party's roles is supposed to be that it exists for moments in history such as these, when Leftists who have spent all the money unwisely have decided that the answer is even more of what put the country in a hole in the first place. If it is doing its job properly, the Tory party says: this has to stop and here is a better way which will restore prosperity.

The whole point is that Brown is flourishing because traditionally socialist solutions, rubbished by the Tories for decades, are proving to be the ones needed now: state intervention and regulation, to name but two.

The Tory party has spent over 100 years opposing state intervention and regulation. Now those two actions prove to be about the only thing which is giving the British and world economies any hope of salvation.

Let's face it, the Tories are on the wrong side of history at the moment. Brown, that old Scots socilaista, is on the right side of history - and that's the reason for his smile and the Cameron/Osbourne discomfiture.