Alice Miles in her article – No way for a PM to behave -  in today’s Times, says Monday’s Northern Rock announcemnet isn’t about Northern Rock, or Alistair Darling.  “It was about the Prime Minister, his Government, his character.” In the final paragraphs of her article, she says:

“In the meantime, the pieces of Northern Rock litter No 10. Move away from Westminster and hear what people think: that these are Mr Brown’s chickens coming home to roost, a Chancellor and now Prime Minister who floated a public spending boom off the back of a greedy financial sector betting in increasingly convoluted structures not understood by politicians on rising house prices artificially inflated by foreign billionaires, the whole underpinned by ordinary people unprotected by a weak regulatory system put in place by the same man now intent upon using our money to prop up votes in his northern heartlands. Or something like that. Welcome to Britain, 2008: caustic, cynical, furious, and agog at the impotence of politicians in the face of the amoral, international super-rich.

As Mr Brown didn’t quote the miserable Donne as continuing, never send to know for whom the bell tolls – it tolls for thee.