Kaletsky: Cameron reverts to failed policies of Major and Lamont

Anatole Kaletksy of The Times, among Britain's leading economic commentators, has been a fierce critic of Gordon Brown's government, writing last Spring that "Mr Brown was a great Chancellor but is a terrible Prime Minister".

But David Cameron and the Conservatives get both barrels from Kaletsky in a scathing must-read Times column attacking the economic illiteracy of a new policy which puts the Tories "at loggerheads with almost every government and central bank in the world".

The good news for the world economy is that Mr Brown has become a leader of global stature, filling the policy vacuum created by the clueless dithering of the Bush Administration and the surprising failure of Barack Obama to step into the breach. The bad news for Britain is that the Tories have chosen this moment to self-destruct, leaving no plausible alternative to Labour

But it gets worse for David Cameron:

Talleyrand's famous remark about the House of Bourbon - that they had “learnt nothing and forgotten nothing” - seems to apply with equal force to David Cameron's Conservatives ... Mr Cameron showed that he had forgotten nothing by suddenly reverting to the policies of John Major ... These were policies that Mr Cameron used to advocate when he worked for Norman Lamont. The leader of the Tory “modernisers” was supposed to have forgotten all this nonsense when he left the side of the former Chancellor on Black Wednesday, but he has now reverted to type.