CONSERVATIVE LEADER David Cameron has moved to check Gordon Brown's threatened political recovery with his most ferocious attack yet on "the complete and utter failure" of Labour's economic record.
Stung by international praise for Mr Brown's plan to bail out the banking system - and startled by suggestions that improving poll ratings might tempt the prime minister into a general election next spring - Mr Cameron used a speech in the City of London to contradict Mr Brown's assertions that the international crisis is the result of developments in America and beyond the domestic political control of his government.
"The failure to regulate US sub-prime mortgages was an American failure," Mr Cameron told his audience: "And the failure to regulate public and private debt in Britain was a British failure.
"It was a failure Gordon Brown was warned about time and again. And time and again he ignored those warnings. Four years ago he was telling the City: 'I want us to do even more to encourage the risk takers'.
"Two years ago he was dismissing calls for what he called a 'regulatory crackdown' on the City. And only last year, he was celebrating what he called a 'golden age for the City of London' . . . Now he's describing that very same time as an Age of Irresponsibility."
Mr Brown this week invoked the wartime Blitz spirit to rally public support with the promise that if the country pulled together in the face of the current crisis, it would emerge even stronger.
Mr Cameron mocked this, as he made clear the limits of the so-called bipartisan approach to the financial crisis.
"A Golden Age to an Age of Irresponsibility - in less than a year. To misquote Churchill: Some rock. Some stability. Does Gordon Brown really think he's going to get away with that?" asked the Tory leader.
Mr Brown, he suggested, was hoping "that his whirlwind of summitry" would lead people to forget what had gone before.
"Forget that he stripped the Bank of England of its powers to supervise the City. Forget he accelerated - how he actively encouraged - the risk-taking culture in our banks. Forget that he promised, time and time again, that he had abolished boom and bust. Forget that, as we enter a downturn, where jobs, homes and livelihoods will be lost, that he was the one who created this mess in the first place," declared Mr Cameron. "But I won't forget - and the British people won't forget."
Mr Cameron said it was an important judgment call for the Conservative opposition to back the recapitalisation of British banks with billions of pounds of taxpayers' money. But this did not mean an embrace of the government's economic policy and doctrine.
Labour, claimed Mr Cameron, had broken the British economy while Mr Brown's false economic assumptions now lay in ruins.
And in an echo of Barack Obama's presidential campaign in America, Mr Cameron insisted: "Any proper consideration of what the policies of the last decade have produced leads us to three simple words. We need change."
British voters prefer Barack Obama over John McCain by 64 per cent to 15 per cent, according to an international survey. Research by eight leading newspapers including the Guardian found 67 per cent of British voters had a worse opinion of the US than before the Bush presidency began.