At prime minister's question time today Gordon Brown wiped the floor with David Cameron, not a sentiment many political journalists ever expected to write. It is never easy for an Opposition having to say "Me Too," but today the Conservative leader sounded feeble, implausible, opportunist even.
Repeated denunciations of City greed and short-sightedness is not what we have come to expect from the smoothly recovering (up to now) Cameroon Tories.
That phase may not last. Nor is Brown yet out of the woods, not at all, though the world economic crisis which has come to dominate his short premiership - all but the first six weeks of it - finally seems to have galvanised him. As he rattled through the technical stuff at the dispatch box today he looked and sounded as if he is in charge.
He even produced a 0.5% interest rate cut out of the hat - not just in Britain, but across the developed world, a very Brownite flourish. It may or may not work to help restore confidence and months will pass before voters know for sure.
Combined with Alistair Darling's stablisation package it addessed the mood of mounting hysteria among the moneymen.
Proof that the crisis has a lot of unwinding still to do came as Vince Cable, the shrewd LibDem spokesman, revealed that up to half London's 32 borough councils have rashly put big deposits in those Icelandic banks.
Yet in the Commons - and at his earlier press conference - Brown was conspicuously careful to cover his political back by repeatedly stressing that the rescue package is not just about saving feckless bankers, it is about small business loans, mortgages, jobs and output in the real economy - where most Britons live.
How dependent on such considerations will the Treasury's £50bn worth of loans, on offer to help recapitalise stricken banks, be when the bankers produce their begging bowls and detailed negotiations start?
Officials in Whitehall keep stressing that this will be a commercial set of deals, with the taxpayers money protected by preferential shares and a premium on the interest rates.
They cannot impose policies on banks with regard to small business, or for that matter on extravagant, short-term remuneration packages for executives who were thereby incentivised to take risks with the shareholders money - and pocket their bonuses before it all caught up with them.
That is what enraged US voters on fabled Main St last month when the first outline of ex-Wall St Treasury secretary, Hank Paulson's, rescue package emerged.
Since the US elections, Congressional as well as Presidential, are now less than a month away voters got their elected representatives attention without difficulty.
From left and right it was attacked, as bailing out crooks or interfering socialism which will undermine markets. The stalemate was resolved through the usual pork barrel politics which permeated Capitol Hill. All sorts of local goodies were attached to the bill to square the rebels. That is how they do it there where Congress is independent of the executive branch - in the White House at the other end of Pennsylvannia Avenue - and holds the purse strings.
But Brown must fear a similar voter backlash in Britain, encouraged by have-it-both-ways media commentary which slams ministers for dithering, then accuses them of a "state grab" when they put up a package which protects taxpayers by taking those shares.
Most Labour MPs sounded grateful when they heard details today. Labour leftwingers have understandably rejoiced at the sight of nationalisations, their long discredited recipe for anything that moved. " We've finally implemented the 1983 manifesto," quipped one veteran of Michael Foot's notorious defeat. They are - as ever - a minority.
Yet older workers, who remember the battles over ageing British heavy industries which eventually died might ask " why rescue the banks if the deep mined pits were allow to close?"
But today's nationalisations are not like Jim Callaghan's in the 70s, a response to structural problems - rigid labour unions with entrenched legal rights , under-investment ( the two were linked), weak and demoralised management, cheaper products competing from abroad, shortsighted shareholders.
Despite getting huge sums of public money the Callaghan era's nationalisations - steel, ship building, cars, aerospace - mostly did not save those industries. They went into decline and disappeared; or were privatised and either thrived or died. Some have been rebuilt, cars for instance, under foreign ownership. Coal has recovered, albeit not the deep mines, as revenues dwindled from North Sea oil and gas, the big cheque in Thatcher's purse which financed her savage manufacturing restructuring.
We can find energy sources in many places. Banks are central to the UK economy since the 80s, the financial sector worth close to 10% of the economy. The difference is that it cannot be allowed to fail. Just as the terms of debate have changed for coal (is it too dirty?) since the miners strike of 1983-84 which scarred Brown's rising generation it has for banks - and the voters expectations of cheap and plentiful credit during the boom decades.
The changed public mood too, more assertive and individualistic, less patient, is also what Brown, his ministers and MPs, must grapple with. When the rising economies of Asia - India as well as China and its near neighbours - had surplus funds, the fruit of their export boom, to park, they put much of it into western banks. That fuelled the stock market, consumer and other bubbles. "The West drowned in Asian liquidity," one Chinese banker recently explained.
Explaining why much of that may now be at risk - to a public, loyal Labour voters among them, frightened for its jobs, its homes, its summer holidays and pensions pot - will not be easy for ministers. The crisis has given Brown the chance to get voters attention again after they had stopped listening. It forced him to embrace enemies like Peter Mandelson, but the political crisis, like its economic cousin, still has a long way to unwind.
