The Sketch: Gordon Brown's grin bodes evil for future of economy

The Sketch's many enemies are unanimous: whatever failings of charity and grace this column may be guilty of, its financial commentary has a god-like accuracy. What we saw in the Treasury Select Committee yesterday prompts some very specific advice: sell. Sell everything. Go to cash, and get out of sterling.

The Chancellor's stance is unmistakable. This is not the time for cool heads. This is not the time to avoid extreme reactions. Now is the time to panic.

This advice is not a function of the Chancellor's lunacy, which goes up and down with the exchange rate (he's 5 per cent saner than he was before Christmas). No, his unequivocal indication was that the economy had climbed into a hand cart and was hell-bound.

Now he needs all the help he can get. How did he convey this? By smiling. He was smiling all the time.

And he answered a question. He's never done that before. No matter how dire things have been, he has never answered a question and he has never sought our good opinion by smiling at us.

Those who find this evidence too slight to act on can look forward to an old age of misery, poverty and horror and it will be entirely their own fault. In Treasury questions directly afterwards, Mr Brown confirmed the diagnosis by declining to answer any questions relating to the economy. He now keeps as far away from the subject as it is possible for a chancellor to be.

Questions about tax and the national insurance hikes were left for his minions. He reserved the voter-friendly issues of education in Africa. It's hard to be against education in Africa, but the sight of Gordon Brown hiding behind a promise to educate every child in the world in two decades' time was nauseating.

"Resources will be tied to reform," he said. These countries must guarantee that the aid we are promising will go to the people. That transparency will increase. That corruption will cease. That a complete cultural change must be effected. As this column has noted, when politicians call for a complete cultural change we know they are defeated and their purposes are dust.

Look – if it is true, as was claimed, that only 8 per cent of the money promised to British hospices two years ago has arrived, how can they think of getting the billions they're offering to those places half a world away? It is fatally reminiscent of that fat ass John Prescott's offer in 1997 to be judged on traffic flows after five years.

John Redwood did us a service by reminding us of the words boom and bust. The end of the housing boom only means one thing.

The Chancellor reassured us that studies were being done. That will help in hell, won't it?

And while Michael Howard was jeering at the Chancellor's downgraded growth forecasts we noticed that he has changed his accent. It's no longer: "pipple will slip izzy in their beds," as he used to say. Voice modification means one thing only: leadership challenge. I've got money on it. It may be the only money I have, after the Chancellor's work is done.

Simoncarr75@hotmail.com