General Election Betting / Chicken Dinner / 31 March 2009 / Leave a comment

The world's political elite in town but even that brings more pain to under-fire Prime Minister.

With the caravans and bandwagons of the G20 rolling into London to disgorge their sleek-suited power brokers, this is a big week for Gordon Brown and his rescue mission. His mission to rescue himself, that is.

His chances of surviving at the next election depend on one thing and one thing alone: the performance of the British economy. For possibly the first time in modern peacetime election history, health and education are not going to get the screen time they've come to consider their due. Its going to be tax, interest rates, house prices, unemployment, worthless pensions and which cardboard box makes the best home for a family of five.

Frank Field MP was on the television the other day forecasting imminent civil disobedience, a euphemistic description for berserkers throwing Molotov cocktails at the nearest hard surface, preferably a policeman's helmet. And just in case the PM were in any doubt about the gravity of his task, on the eve of the G20, the super-investor George Soros reminded him that this is a crisis unlike any other. It's a total collapse of the financial system.

Mr Brown has witnessed a similar withering effect on his price on the betting markets. Labour's chances of winning an overall majority at the next election are now in outer space at [10.0] on Betfair (the Tories are [1.56], no overall majority is [3.75]). He is also expected to give himself as long as possible in his search for a miracle, with the Betfair price on the election being held next year - when the clock runs out - standing at [1.24].

Successful rescue missions, however, rarely start off with a puncture. The G20 leaders and their huge-brained advisers haven't marched into battle against the crisis yet, but the communique they were to release once their work on the battlefield was done (on Thursday) has already been leaked to Der Spiegel. There were suspicions that the leak was a deliberate act of sabotage by sources within the German government, where Chancellor Angela Merkel is adopting a more cautious approach to fiscal moves to boost the national economy than Mr Brown, said Monday's Telegraph.

But Brown would presumably find being undermined by Germans a considerable improvement on the sort of abuse he receives daily in the British press. Do the honourable thing, Mr Brown, wrote Matthew Parris in the Times on Saturday. Run away. He isn't any good, he wrote. He's failing. He's embarrassing. He's dreadful. His colleagues know this. Yet they are gripped with a terrible fatalism, sliding toward election defeat as though catastrophe were unavoidable. Defeat isn't, but catastrophe is.

Catastrophe may be imminent, but just as Mr Brown had no idea the course he was so prudently plotting for all those years at the Exchequer would almost guide Britain onto the rocks of bankruptcy, some unforeseen economic tide will eventually refloat whatever wreckage of the economy is left, and if it happens soon enough, Mr Brown will take credit for it. If he can make his own myopic economic foresight look like real vision (a trick we'll be seeing many politicians attempt over the next few years), then Saviour of the Nation starts to look quite good on a CV.

It feels like a long shot, especially for a man who has few allies and little luck. But we do know that this crisis has produced imagination-defying twists, and we also know that in the midst of the storm, visibility can be near zero. So, experts, it's not only the one-eyed captain who cant see what lies ahead.