This increased home ownership by encouraging about 2 million American families to take on debt they couldn’t afford. It was all right as long as they could refinance using the equity created by a booming market to do it.

We had something similar here with banks lending mega-multiples of salaries to fuel the biggest house price boom in memory. Gordon Brown, as Chancellor, did nothing whatever to stop it. Indeed, as I have pointed out above, he had a vested interest in stoking it for all it as worth because of the extra stamp duty and inheritance tax it brought in its wake.

What leftish governments were doing on both sides of the Atlantic was to blow more and more air into a bubble that was bound to burst as all previous ones have done. They used a variety of methods to persuade the banks to go along, from compliance units monitoring lending policies to adopting an inflation index (the CPI) which deliberately ignored house price inflation and requiring the Bank of England to set interest rates in accordance with that – ensuring a massive inflation of cheap credit.

To paraphrrase ‘The Weakest Link’ ‘Gordon and Bill have been the weakest players in this round. But will the votes follow the facts?’

Curiously this turn of events seems to be benefiting Gordon Brown, if some polls are to be believed. BBC commentators especially are seizing on it almost to blame the Tories for the crisis or at the very least for not having solved it. The aggressive tone of Emily Maitlis’s interview with George Osborne last night betrayed a hostility not in evidence last week when Labour politicians were being interviewed. On wonders why.

David Cameron has struck the right note for a Leader of the Opposition and PM in waiting in this situation. ‘We are a responsible opposition’ who will not seek party advantage. It’s hard to see what else he could do under the circumstances.

But we must not, and the BBC must not, lose sight of the following:-

• The Tories are no more responsible for any part of this than the Man in the Moon. They’ve been out of office for 11 years.
• The present government encouraged people to believe that it had abolished the economic cycle. It was GB’s proudest boast, oft repeated, and believed by many people including himself.
• Brown directed the ‘independent’ Bank of England to concentrate its attention and interest rate policy on a price index that deliberately ignored the most sustained period of house price inflation in living memory. Low interest rates thus fuelled the massive boom in house prices and general debt that caused the economy to become the subject of a financial bubble that was bound to burst some day.
• Brown threw money at unreformed public services more lavishly than any previous Chancellor. He had the most benign economic circumstances for Britain since 1914 in which to do so and his profligacy has left the cupboard bare. This policy gave him a vested interest in stoking house price inflation because of the revenue it brought in stamp duty and inheritance tax.
• The bursting of that bubble – entirely foreseeable to anyone with a smattering of economic history – has led to collapse of tax receipts and a black hole in the public finances.
• Nevertheless at Manchester last week Brown was making unfunded spending pledges galore.

So is Brown really the best man to deal with the crisis?