I'm afraid I missed the press conference for foreign press this morning where Gordon Brown was asked how it felt to be regarded a superhero. I was at a Lib Dem briefing instead, but Nick Clegg never gets questions about being perceived as the saviour of the global capitalism.
Jim Pickard from the FT has a nice post about the Brown appearance here. Clegg's news conference was rather different, but what the two events show is that everyone at Westminster is currently obsessed with trying to work out who's going benefit politically from the banking crisis.
Let's start with the Tories. The best guide to their official thinking on this is a post that has gone up on the ConservativeHome website.
ConservativeHome is virtually an official party noticeboard and some of the comments I found hard to take at face value. For example, I couldn't read the line "the Tory leadership was unfazed by recent events" without thinking: "They are fazed by recent events."
And "the Tories are not worried about being largely out of the news" also sounded hard to swallow. If so, what was David Cameron doing on the Jeremy Vine show this afternoon?
But the key message did sound more plausible. It was this:
The Tory leadership hopes and expects the recapitalisation package to succeed in stabilising the banking sector. But the leadership does not expect that Brown will win any long-term credit for any of this. Brown, we were told, will soon be seen to have saved the banks but not averted recession and there aren't many votes in that. They are cataloguing evidences of Labour "triumphalism" at recent events for later use.
And this is the key: The Tories are going to present themselves as the people to rescue the "real economy". They are convinced that Brown will not connect with voters who start losing their homes and jobs next year. "He is incapable of empathy".
As for Brown, he clearly knows that being praised by the winner of the Nobel prize for economics as the saviour of the world's financial system doesn't mean he's going to win the next election. At the briefing, when asked if he was now "Flash Gordon", he said he wasn't. "Just Gordon, I can assure you," he said.
I think you should look at what they were saying about me four weeks ago … Politics, I have found, is about ups and downs, and you have got to treat adversity and periods of popularity with equal equanimity.
Some of the recent polls have been very favourable. But, as I mentioned on a blog yesterday, if you look beneath the headlines at the underlying findings of the latest YouGov survey, they're still pretty grim for Labour.
And as for the Lib Dems? When I asked Clegg for his assessment, he came out with this:
I think this banking crisis will be to this parliament what the Iraq war was to the last parliament. It will be the biggest issue by far and the response of the political parties will be as important to their credibility in the eyes of the public as was their response to the invasion of Iraq. I think it is revealing that on both these issues, the Liberal Democrats stand apart from Labour and the Conservatives in calling it right well before either of the other two parties realised the enormity of what the country was entering into.
Clegg is entitled to say that Vincent Cable was banging on about the levels of debt in the economy long before it became fashionable. And Iraq was good for the Lib Dems at the time of the 2005 election.
But the problem with Clegg's analogy is that the Tories and Labour were still in favour of the Iraq war in 2005. Now, all the parties are agreed on the need to rescue the banking system.
