Brown’s really bad day

Today, even by his own standards,  has been an extraordinarily  bad one for the Prime Minister.

At PMQs he was savaged almost to destruction by David Cameron, who accused him of giving the House inaccurate information last week about capital expenditure growth between now and 2012.   Far from increasing, as Brown had contended, expenditure would actually fall after 2009 – 2010.

Brown, in replying, became angry –  no, furious –  and almost incoherent.  Embarrassingly, his hair became dishevelled and formed a Bill Haley–style kiss curl in the middle of his forehead.   He looked awful and very isolated,  his backbenchers sitting  ominously silent.

Later in the day, before the Treasury select committee, Mervyn King added to the PM’s woes by criticising the Government’s “unambitious” response to the need to reduce the alarming level of public borrowing:

“The scale of the deficit is truly extraordinary. 12.5% of GDP is not something that anybody would have anticipated even a year or two ago, and this reflects the scale of the global downturn.

“There will certainly need to be a plan for the lifetime of the next Parliament, contingent on the state of the economy, to show how those deficits will be brought down if the economy recovers to reach levels of deficits below those which were shown in the Budget figures.”

So, on the whole, an even worse than usual day for Gordon Brown. 

I wonder how many of those Labour MPs who pledged loyalty to him those two short weeks ago are now cursing themselves and their colleagues for their lack of resolve.