It is worth downloading this Sunday’s The World This Weekend to listen to how a finance minister should not behave during a financial panic. In the words of Fraser Nelson, the Chancellor is losing his grip, muddling his figures and rambling on irrelevantly about how a twenty five year-old David Cameron worked for Norman Lamont during the ERM crisis. Stuttering, he covered his ass by passing the buck to the Financial Services Authority – expect that to be a common refrain in the coming days.

Since Darling brought up the subject, Guido thinks this is Labour’s ERM equivalent moment, when this government loses whatever reputation it had for economic competence. It is going to be very hard for them to blame this instability on the Tories, perhaps they will blame it on Mervyn King at the Bank of England.

Darling has been on the phone to Benedict Brogan spinning furiously, complaining that everything is fine, that Cameron is playing politics. “He’s acting like a Tory backbencher, not the Leader of the Opposition. It’s completely opportunistic at a time when he ought to be reassuring people,” one “senior source” (with white hair) is quoted by Brogan. Playing politics, eh?

If anything the Tories have been slow to press home to the voters the reality of the “debt and mirrors” economics of Gordon Brown. Can you imagine this happening when Gordon was opposition shadow chancellor? Would he have gone around “reassuring people”? Would he hell. He would have said that it was the Chancellor’s fault and that it was the policies of the government that brought this on. He didn’t say on White Wednesday that exiting the ERM would lead to the longest period of unbroken economic growth in living memory. Gordon said it was a disaster. How should Osborne describe Britain’s biggest home lender of last year going bust?

Osborne might do well to point to moves like the loosening of bank reserve requirements which reduced the cushion of capital required of Northern Rock. Far worse still is Gordon’s dishonest manipulation of the MPC’s composite inflation target to justify the lower interest rates which have encouraged the property bubble. It is not as if there have not been enough warnings…