Europe? Send Melanie
GORDON Brown is almost the first Labour Chancellor not to have learned this lesson the hard way. In a span of six decades, Philip Snowden, Hugh Dalton, Stafford Cripps, Hugh Gaitskell, James Callaghan, Roy Jenkins and Denis Healey all found out. Their present-day successor is apt to credit his good luck to his own brilliance, or prudence, but his luckiest moment came when the founders of the euro went ahead without him. (The gover- nor of the Bank of England has been mak- ing the same point more tactfully.) No won- der that the Treasury has been cooling on the prospect and that his advisers talk of political tests, as well as his five economic tests, which must be passed before we joined. All those ministerial meetings in Europe have worn his enthusiasm down. He came to office as an addictive attender, never happier than when flying off to some spa town, but to this month's round of hand-wringing about the euro he dis- patched his latest junior minister, Melanie Johnson, He had work to do.
Previous page
