British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, it is widely accepted, has had a good credit crunch. A couple of months ago, just a year after taking over from the charismatic Tony Blair, Brown was virtually dead in the water. His support, it seemed, did not extend much beyond his own family. The only question was whether he could survive until Christmas. Last weekend, the opinion polls confirmed in public what the opposition Conservative Party had already conceded in private: Brown had dramatically returned from the dead. He was still trailing in the polls, but his opponent's seemingly unassailable 20 percent lead had been slashed to just 9 percent. The economic crisis has put a smile on the face of the usually dour Brown, who had been labeled a "twitching corpse" by one unkind legislator. Amid the credit squeeze, various bank crises, plummeting house prices and rising joblessness, he had conjured up a rescue plan that was enthusiastically embraced on both sides of the Atlantic. Newly anointed Nobel economics laureate Paul Krugman was moved to declare in reverential tones that Brown had "defined the character of the worldwide rescue effort, with other wealthy nations playing catch-up." And, in the opinion of the French daily Le Monde, he had "donned the mantle of Churchill and come into his own in times of crisis."
Gordon Brown: Dead Man Waking?
