Fraser Nelson

At 8pm on Friday, Sky will broadcast an interview with Gordon Brown which seals off what will be his best day for months. The risible idea that he somehow played matchmaker between HBOS and Lloyds TSB proved irresistible to news editors last night. It fuses together the political crisis with the financial one and has been written into the script. Him bumping into the part-time chairman of board of Lloyds (not Eric Daniels, who actually runs the company) has been puffed up into the moment when (as one newspaper put it) Brown ordered banks to merge. It’s the perfect myth, which allows him to say “I’m your man for the economic meltdown.” That’s not to say there were not plenty of political sweeteners in this deal, as James blogged earlier.

Is Gordon Brown trying to take credit for the HBOS-Lloyds merger? Sounds implausible, but the blog of Robert Peston, Brown’s biographer, has this snippet: “I am hearing that this deal has been negotiated at a very high pay grade level, with the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, talking to Sir Victor Blank, chairman of Lloyds TSB, about how helpful it would be if Sir Victor could bring himself to end the uncertainty hanging over HBOS by buying it.” If this is true, I’m amazed the takeover went ahead, given that Brown tends to be 180 degrees wrong about any financial deal – whether it be selling gold at the bottom of the market or selling British Energy shares before they skyrocketed.

Nick Clegg is right when he says that “Labour are on the wrong side of the biggest issue in British politics – the argument about the big state versus the smaller state.” But which side are the Liberal Democrats on? His plans for tax cuts look about as sound as a No10 soufflé. The 4p cut in income tax would be replaced by a local income tax – so a tax shift, not a tax cut. The £20 billion cuts in Whitehall spending are not all for tax relief, some of this (they don’t say how much) would be diverted to other state spending. Compared against the £679bn of state spending planned for 2010/11 – rising by £30bn a year - it’s laughably low.

Ed Balls’s announcement today of 100 co-operative schools deserves to be taken seriously, as it shows sign of Brown responding to Cameron’s “choice” agenda in schools. First, Brown dismissed choice as he had done under Blair. Now, he realises he has to respond to it and today’s move is, as Joe Murphy says, a “battle over parent power”. Michael Gove (in Sweden right now, looking at the schools model he proposes for Britain) scored a success in his version of parent power, where they’d be free to choose whatever school they want. Balls proposes a “co-operative” model which sounds a lot more radical than it is. It would – in theory – mean schools run by parent boards, rather than by the local authority.

Gordon Brown’s boast of having created “three million new jobs” has always had to come with the major unspoken caveat that (according to the Statistics Commission) 81% of these “new jobs” in this working-age population are accounted for by immigration. Yet for my cover story on immigration tomorrow I asked the Office for National Statistics to do one further exercise for me: break it down by public and private sector. The results were as I expected. In the period Apr-Jun 97 there were 18.1m UK-born people working in the private sector. In Apr-Jun 07, it had actually fallen - to 18.0 million. So strip away immigration and state sector expansion and there are fewer British jobs, not more.

Two analyses of the economy today, one fanciful and one spot-on. Gordon Brown says “I am confident that we can get through these difficult times and meet these challenges a stronger, more secure and fairer country then ever before.” Why is he confident? The cure for this will require the precise opposite to his policies – and this is what he shows no sign of beginning to grasp. The UK economy has buckled under the weight of the debt Brown has rung up. The speech of recovery will be dictated by how debt-burdened countries are going into recession. Britain starts – starts – with a 3% deficit, and this may become a 7% deficit by 2010. More Brownite policies could take us back to IMF bailout territory of the 1970s.

Poor Ivan Lewis. Previously we only heard from this health minister when he cropped up to criticise Gordon Brown through some coded newspaper article. Now he's on the front page of the Mail on Sunday, exposed for sending inappropriate texts to a former female aide. So where did this story come from? Strikingly absent from the Mail on Sunday’s story is any detail from the woman's side. No text message is reproduced, or any basic content alluded to. If she had sold her story (and the Mail on Sunday has the deepest pockets on Fleet Street for this kind of thing) you'd expect some personal detail even if not in quotes. They also fronted up her parents, another sign that she is not the source. No, this story appears to have come from Whitehall sources.

I was sitting about 30 metres away from Sarah Palin when she walked on stage, and lost all remaining objectivity at that point. She looked bashful and nervous, as well you might if you had 20,000 boisterous Republicans roaring at you. I don’t normally feel sympathy for politicians but there was something about this tiny mother of five being plunged into the toughest bear pit in America that made it almost hard to watch. She stood at the podium for what seemed like an eternity, as the crowd roared. It was as if she was waiting for them to calm down, but they don’t. She had to just start talking, and they’d shut up. But she didn’t – she just stood there, not even quite smiling confidently.