The credibility crunch

Iain Dale makes an impassioned plea for his party to pin the blame for the credit crisis on Gordon Brown:

"Brown and his allies cannot be allowed to persuade the British people that he and his government had no part in allowing this crisis to happen. The British people are more intelligent than that, but Conservatives spokespeople need to get out there on the media and tell it like it is."

He may have a point. it was on Gordon and new Labour's watch that this crisis was seeded. Perhaps, as Mr Dale, suggests, he ignored warnings about the inadequacy of the system. Maybe he stood by while debt got out of control. That could all be true, and still the Conservatives would no be able to lead the case for the prosecution. Why?

Because nobody believes the Tories would have operated a more restrictive system. No-one, surely, thinks that a Conservative government would have clamped down on the debt, or fettered the big banks. And I'm not just talking about the chattering classes, here. I doubt whether your average bloke will give the Conservatives any credence if they start to suggest that they would have operated a less Anglo-Saxon, more European system of financial regulation.