Has Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, saved the world financial system?

… Mr. Brown and Alistair Darling, the chancellor of the Exchequer (equivalent to our Treasury secretary), have defined the character of the worldwide rescue effort, with other wealthy nations playing catch-up.

This is an unexpected turn of events … the British economy is far smaller than the U.S. economy, and the Bank of England doesn’t have anything like the influence either of the Federal Reserve or of the European Central Bank. So you don’t expect to see Britain playing a leadership role.

But the Brown government has shown itself willing to think clearly about the financial crisis, and act quickly on its conclusions. And this combination of clarity and decisiveness hasn’t been matched by any other Western government, least of all our own. [emphasis added]

- Paul Krugman, yesterday. Earlier that day, he won the Nobel Prize for Economics.

What we have here is a Prime Minister who, thanks to his quick thinking, is literally leading the rescue of the world’s financial system; and we want to throw him out of office in favour of an untried kid because, a year ago, he dithered over whether to call an election?