LONDON (AFP) — Prime Minister Gordon Brown has won praise at home and abroad for taking a lead in tackling the global financial crisis, reversing his image from doomed ditherer to would-be saviour in weeks.
Commentators including the new Nobel economics laureate say Brown has become "decisive" and "courageous" in putting together a rescue package for leading high street banks that has, at least partly, inspired similar bailouts abroad.
US economist Paul Krugman, who was awarded the Nobel prize on Monday, said the Brown government "has shown itself willing to think clearly about the financial crisis, and act quickly on its conclusions.
"This combination of clarity and decisiveness hasn't been matched by any other Western government -- least of all our own," Krugman wrote in The New York Times.
Brown's banking plan has been well received because it acts in three ways: pumping capital into banks by buying stakes in them, injecting liquidity to help them meet their immediate needs, and guaranteeing interbank lending -- a crucial function of banking that has almost dried up.
The Financial Times on Tuesday described Brown's measures as "systematic and comprehensive".
"The prime minister has taken bold steps to save the financial system and -- with it -- the real economy," it wrote. "The model he has set out for rescuing banks is a good one, and is now being imitated across Europe and in the US."
Even in Japan, leading private network Fuji Television said "Britain took the initiative regarding responses in Europe" to the crisis, while Tokyo markets analyst Kazuhiro Takahashi of Daiwa Securities SMBC said Brown "took action on quite a large scale, which affected other countries".
European observers noted the irony that Brown, who as chancellor prevented Britain from adopting the euro, was invited to a weekend meeting of eurozone leaders in Paris to brief them on the British plan.
"It was he, the magician of Anglo-Saxon social-liberalism, who gave the Europeans lessons on interventionism," France's Le Monde newspaper said on Monday, using the Gallic term for British and American orthodoxy.
It went further, saying Brown's "solid proposals" had "inspired the global plan adopted in Paris to try to restore confidence in the financial markets".
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the global financial crisis has come at a good time for Brown.
Last month, he was still fighting off his own Labour MPs who were calling for a leadership contest following a series of electoral defeats and his last-minute decision last year to cancel plans for a snap general election.
But that was before the collapse of the US investment bank Lehman Brothers, which took the credit crunch into a new dimension.
Brown has drawn on his decade as chancellor to rise to the challenge in an area he understands and in which he clearly feels comfortable.
Having told Europe how to fix their banks, he on Monday spoke to an audience of bankers and journalists in London on the need to adopt a "new financial architecture", saying he would lead attempts to reform the Bretton Woods system.
He even evoked the spirit of wartime prime minister Winston Churchill in calling for forward thinking now, "in the heat of battle".
Brown himself says he has no intention of assuming the super-hero status others are conferring on him.
Asked by a foreign reporter if he was now happy to go by the name of "Flash Gordon," he replied: "Just Gordon, just Gordon, I can assure you."
But while he has undoubtedly been emboldened by the crisis, commentators are warning him not to get carried away.
Labour are still trailing the Conservatives in the polls, and as The Times pointed out on Tuesday, Churchill won World War II -- but lost the 1945 election.
"Even if Mr Brown wins his war, he may not win the peace," the paper's political correspondent Rachel Sylvester wrote.
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