"This is no time for a novice" to be running the country, Gordon Brown told the Labour Party conference in Manchester this week, to much unctious fawning and applause.

To those of us not entirely enamoured by his performance as, first, Chancellor, and now Prime Minister, this is rather akin to Captain Edward Smith, captain of the Titanic, boasting that he was the only one with the experience to carry on steering the ship even though he'd just ploughed the thing into an iceberg.

Admittedly, we can't blame Brown\Smith for the iceberg (although it wouldn't surprise me to learn that releasing icebergs into the Atlantic wasn't part of some Brown-led government-sponsored scheme for the early release of recalcitrant 'bergs), but Brown designed the ship (it's called tripartite regulation of financial services), built the ship (with your money, not to mention the few billion that went astray in fraud and overpayments to contractors), plotted the course and was at the wheel when the crunch (credit or otherwise) came.

Or maybe it's not like that at all. Maybe it's more like a conman has been on the lam with your credit card, spraying money around like an incontinent muckspreader, and then, when the police finally catch up with him, arguing that as he has been using the card recently, he had more experience of it and therefore ought to be able to hold on to it and continue his spending spree. Something like that.

Good grief. He's been in charge of the nation's purse strings for over ten years. How much more time does he think we should give him to utterly screw over the economy?

Maybe it's like Colin Ireland (the serial killer of gays who wanted infamy as a mass murderer), Brown is not going to be happy until the government has to go begging to the IMF for a bail-out and the entire country is on the brink of bankruptcy, thus equalling the record of our last Labour government.