Northern Rock Plan Backfires on Brown

A day after the chancellor of the exchequer announced new plans to accelerate the sale of Northern Rock, the British press sees serious trouble for Gordon Brown's government and no certainty that the taxpayers' $110 billion will be repaid. Anatole Kaletsky, a leading Times columnist who has been sympathetic to Labour in the past, is scathing: "Mr. Brown's career as a serious politician ended yesterday."

Brown, who for 10 years established Labour as the party of economic competence, had to "explode the entire fiscal framework on which Labour has built its tax and spending policies," Kaletsky writes. Other papers are equally disappointed: The right-leaning Telegraph bashes the "inept handling of this crisis from the outset," and an Independent columnist finds the "complacency" over the Rock's collapse "very hard to forgive." (More Alistair Darling stories.)