In the weeks after the 14 September run on Northern Rock, all major British polls (UK Polling Report 2009) calculated that Labour had extended its 3–5-point lead to 6–13 points despite some considerable media criticism of its handling of the crisis (Pratley 2007). Brown’s, and Labour’s, surge in the polls, however, proved to be remarkably short-lived; by October 2007, the Conservative Party had become the preferred government (UK Polling Report 2009). It was against this backdrop that Brown delivered his earliest keynote speech on the downturn in world financial markets.

Certainly, it would be unreasonable to expect that Brown could have known of the scale of the global financial crisis that was to emerge one year later. Nonetheless, his speech was noteworthy insofar as Brown clearly gave his British audience some expectations about the strength of Britain’s economy and its ability to confront future turmoil. This early speech was significant because it affected his room to manoeuvre in subsequently framing the global financial crisis as it entered a more severe phase in September 2008. Brown acknowledged that the downturn in financial markets throughout 2007 was a concerning sign and imputed responsibility for this downturn primarily to global economic factors and partially to the irresponsibility of ‘those who own and run banks’ in Britain. He also emphasised the need to make ‘changes in the financial system globally as well as nationally’.

Brown attempted to normalise the Northern Rock crisis in what he described as the modern ‘age of turbulence’, in which ‘turbulence is the essence of the financial system’. This was an early attempt to defend the economic approach based on free markets taken by ‘New Labour’ since its election victory in 1997. Brown’s speech lauded former US Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan (whom Brown was introducing at the Reuters Building) and he agreed with Greenspan’s statement that the market was now ‘more…self-correcting…than it was even a quarter of a century earlier’, and claimed that this approach had given Britain ‘greater flexibility…to adjust when events threaten our [Britain’s] growth’. Brown warned of the dangers of governments around the world ‘responding with heavy-handed regulation’ and thereby defended the economic status quo. In denouncing protectionism, he furnished the historical analogy of the Enron and WorldCom crashes in the United States, to which the United Kingdom ‘did not respond with heavy-handed regulation’.

One notable assessment of Brown’s speech came from a Guardian journalist who acknowledged that Northern Rock’s directors were at fault, but criticised Brown’s complete denial of responsibility for the crisis. ‘Gordon Brown, a man who claims to be a master of prudent financial management while presiding over a debt-addicted and unbalanced economy, must bear a share of the responsibility’ (Sunderland 2007). Despite Brown’s intent to have this speech seen as a major statement on the economy, it did not receive significant press coverage. Much of the media concentrated instead on Brown’s lead in the polls and the possibility that he would call an early election.

After just three months as Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling was confronted with the largest run on a British bank in more than a century. Public confidence in the nascent Chancellor was dented by the fact that the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), not the government, had broken the story to the public. Furthermore, after the withdrawal of £1 billion in savings from Northern Rock, it took Darling three days to announce that the government would guarantee all deposits up to £35,000.

After the Northern Rock crisis and announcements in late 2007 by more British banks of multi-billion-pound exposures to the US sub-prime mortgage market, Darling averred that the United Kingdom was in ‘uncertain’ and ‘turbulent times’ (Darling 2007b). Nevertheless, he emphasised that the British economy was fundamentally strong and that the public could be confident that the economy would continue to grow. Darling blamed the recent downturn in world financial markets on institutions that had based their growth on risky business models, but also on factors far from British shores that damaged the globalised UK economy. Despite conceding that globalisation and free-marketism had presented challenges to the United Kingdom, the Chancellor declared that the UK economy had been overwhelmingly strengthened by an open and globalised approach since 1997. He also portrayed a potential retreat into protectionism as a dangerous alternative, utilising the exact historical analogy as the Prime Minister—that of the Enron and WorldCom collapses—to demonstrate that financial crises need not be met with a hyper-reactive move away from the sound fundamentals of globalisation and free markets (Darling 2007a). Darling defended the political-economic status quo and prescribed an open and globalised economic orientation as the way for Britain to make it through the financial turmoil.

Through 2007, Darling blamed the crisis on reckless British banks and global factors in equal measure, but in early 2008 he began to emphasise the latter as the predominant cause of Britain’s economic downturn. By this time, Darling was also depicting the crisis in less sanguine tones. In January 2008, he stated that ‘we operate in far more turbulent times’ (Darling 2008a) and claimed that ‘the global economy is facing its biggest test for more than a decade’ (Darling 2008b). His previous predictions that economic growth would remain high were now conspicuously absent. He did, however, maintain that the strong fundamentals of the UK economy—which were created by the Labour Government—meant that ‘Britain is well placed, indeed better placed than almost any other, to see through this uncertainty’ (Darling 2008a).

Overall, the press was more disapproving than supportive of Darling in this period. The three newspapers analysed in this chapter unanimously declared that the Chancellor and the Labour Government had misjudged the severity of Northern Rock’s predicament and had been slow to act when depositors withdrew their savings en masse. In terms of the Chancellor’s severity narrative, The Guardian wrote that Darling was underplaying the turmoil but that this was ‘fair enough’ considering he did not want to ‘spread doom and despondency’ (Elliot 2008a). The Times wrote that Darling had offered only a ‘crossed-fingers’ approach that the slowdown would not be too severe’ (Riddell 2008a:28).

Darling’s causality narrative divided opinion. The Guardian supported Darling, saying that ‘neither he nor the government is the source of the Northern Rock crisis in any way’ (Kettle 2008). The Financial Times, however, declared that the seed of the credit crisis was the Labour Government’s ill-considered centralisation of British financial regulation in 1999 (Morley 2007:11). Darling’s policy proposals prompted little media response, although The Times stated that Darling had ‘little sense…[about] how in the long-term public finances will be restored to health’ (Riddell 2008a:28).

Before the North Rock crisis, Mervyn King was a technocrat known mainly to people within the financial industry and newspaper economics correspondents. His name was periodically mentioned in the general press when he announced interest rate adjustments. His profile rose exponentially, however, after the Northern Rock crisis and he became a key figure in imparting meaning to Britain’s financial turmoil.

King’s early pronouncements on the financial turmoil were more sober than those of the Chancellor and the Prime Minister. Immediately after the run on Northern Rock, King publicly stated that to bail out the bank would be a ‘moral hazard’. Simply put, to rescue the bank with an injection of public funds would discourage responsible financial management among British companies and set a standard for bailing out a raft of irresponsible companies. This indicated King had cause to believe that Northern Rock’s predicament was not an isolated one. Indeed, the Bank of England (BOE) was aware that HSBC had £10.5 billion of exposure to the US sub-prime mortgage market in February 2007 (Seager 2009). Regulatory authorities in the United Kingdom had been aware of other British banks having to write off billions of pounds worth of bad debt throughout 2007. King’s rhetoric in this early period was serious, but perhaps not quite as pessimistic as he might have been behind closed doors. He used measured phrases to acknowledge the significance of the crisis while not denting consumer confidence. He explained that ‘conditions were not yet back to normal and remain[ed] fragile’, and that the intention of financial institutions ‘to tighten conditions further’ was ‘unlikely to be short-lived’ (King 2008a).

King’s early speeches identified the sub-prime mortgage market in the United States as being the focal point of financial turmoil. King stated, ‘The challenges facing us…many of them originate from outside our shores’ and ‘Northern Rock [was] not the epicentre of the current crisis’ (King 2008a) In November 2007, King admitted that, if he had his time again, he would have done several things differently in handling the Northern Rock crisis. This acceptance of partial responsibility was oddly conspicuous compared with the complete denial of blame by Brown and Darling, and later placed less pressure on King to admit blame for not recognising the oncoming British recession (Seager 2009).

The commentary in the three papers expressed some moderate concern that King was underplaying the severity of the crisis, but the main focus was on his causality narrative and policy proposals. The Guardian argued that the Northern Rock crisis was not at all the fault of King or the BOE. The Times agreed that King did not cause the Northern Rock crisis, but pilloried his volte-face on the issue of government bailouts and claimed that the BOE significantly exacerbated the Northern Rock crisis. The Financial Times also pardoned King and the BOE from the charge that they were to blame for not recognising the poor business model of Northern Rock and other British banks, instead blaming the FSA. The Financial Times did, however, indirectly blame King as part of a group of influential central bankers in the developed world, whose monetary policy between 2002 and 2004 was so irresponsible that it was a key source of the present financial turmoil.

There was much gloomy economic news in Britain at the beginning of 2008. January had seen the biggest one-day fall of the FTSE 100 and in February there had been the last-resort nationalisation of Northern Rock and HSBC’s announcement of massive exposure to the US sub-prime mortgage market. Nonetheless, the Chancellor’s keynote budget speech did not alter his late-2007 description of the severity of the crisis, declaring that ‘these were times of global economic uncertainty’. He reiterated the role of global factors in causing the crisis and defended the globalised, free-market orientation of the British economy.

Darling continued to predict growth for the UK economy, although the forecasts were slightly less optimistic than before. One major difference to his previous speeches, however, was that he emphasised economic ‘stability’ more than ‘growth’. Nonetheless, Darling asserted that Britain was ‘uniquely placed to succeed in the global economy’ and ‘enter[s] this period of uncertainty better placed than any other major economy’.

The budget was the dominant issue in the media in the week after its release, with the three major papers largely disagreeing with Darling’s severity narrative. The Times called it a recklessly courageous act to continue to predict growth, while the Financial Times stated that ‘like the rest of us, Alistair Darling is navigating the global economic storms without a compass’ (Stephens 2008:5). The newspaper critiques of Darling’s policy proposals, however, remained vague. The Financial Times argued that the budget was highly imprudent and that the ‘higher borrowing figures were an embarrassment’ (Stephens 2008:5). The Times stated that Darling’s budget was a ‘fingers-crossed’ budget, but qualified this by saying that ‘there is…nothing new about fingers-crossed budgets’ and that this approach ‘was about as good as could have been expected’ in such a challenging economic climate (Kaletsky 2008:1). These newspapers indicate the scepticism and negativity surrounding the policy proposals outlined in Darling’s budget speech.

Consistent with the increase in the severity of the crisis since early 2008, King described the financial milieu as ‘the most prolonged period of financial turmoil that most of us can remember’—a remarkable statement given King’s 40-year career as an economist. This austere statement came before the credit crisis evolved into the global financial crisis after the September 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers. While this statement did maximise the severity of the crisis, it did not convey the possibility of dire systemic turmoil of which King appeared to be aware at this time.

As if to downplay the possibility that his serious description of the financial turmoil might be received with panic, King normalised the financial crisis in the context of economic history. Rather than calling the crisis ‘unprecedented’, as he, Darling and Brown would do in later months, he stated that ‘financial crises [had] been a regular, and disturbing, feature of our and other developed economies’. He stressed that at this time there should not be a reactionary move back to the pre-1997 regulatory framework, adding that ‘no framework can avoid shocks, so we must think carefully about reform’. King also insisted that ‘there is no point blaming anyone for the outcomes’.

King’s reluctance to identify specific actors for their culpability in the crisis might be explained by the critical scrutiny he was receiving in the press for his and the BOE’s handling of the financial crisis, particularly their performance during the Northern Rock crisis. The three newspapers analysed in this chapter focused not on his causality narrative but on his policy proposals. The papers were critical of the fact that the inflation rate had overshot King’s inflation target by a full 1 per cent, and were sceptical about his policy outlook for the continuing credit crisis.

Brown’s October 2008 speech was markedly different in tone to his October 2007 address. By this time, the small UK banking crisis and worldwide credit crunch had morphed into the global financial crisis. Northern Rock required full nationalisation in January 2008 after the unsuitability of takeover bids. In the subsequent months, six more banks—HSBC, HBOS, RBS, Bradford & Bingley, Lloyd’s and Barclay’s—had announced monumental losses (BBC 2009). Moreover, just a few days before Brown’s speech, the Icelandic economy had begun to collapse, and Brown had threatened Reykjavik with legal action in a bid to retrieve savings of UK citizens tied up in Icelandic banks. The domestic political backdrop had also changed from a year before. Brown was consistently between 8 and 15 points behind Conservative leader, David Cameron, in the polls for preferred prime minister (UK Polling Report 2009).

Brown declared that ‘these [are] unprecedented times’. He maximised the severity of the crisis, claiming that ‘the stakes are higher than ever before’. Continuing on from his October 2007 speech, in which he had identified global financial forces as the primary cause of the Northern Rock crisis, Brown proclaimed that ‘this is first and foremost a global crisis’. Furthermore, Brown defended himself, his government, the BOE and the FSA from charges of negligent financial regulation, stating that ‘no one country alone can resolve what is truly a global problem’. Brown declared that this global crisis required a global solution, one in which there would be increased international cooperation to regulate global capital flow. Brown utilised the historical analogy of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill planning the revolutionary post-1945 Bretton Woods regulatory structure in the midst of World War II as a means of affirming the possibility of a new global regulatory system to be achieved by modern-day leaders in the thick of the global financial crisis.

More significantly, Brown emphasised the global causes of the United Kingdom’s financial troubles and thereby shifted what in Chapter 2 of this volume was termed the ‘policy game’ to an international battlefield in which the Conservative Party could not effectively compete (Boin et al. 2009:90–1). In doing so, Brown not only defended the status quo approach to British financial regulation, he cast himself as a ‘change-oriented’ player on global regulatory reform. Brown was at pains in his speech to emphasise his global financial regulation credentials, stating: ‘Almost exactly 10 years ago in a speech at Harvard University I made detailed policy proposals to reshape the international financial system for the new world.’

Brown’s first major speech since the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the subsequent freefall in world financial markets received a lot of media coverage. Brown’s severity narrative encountered some disagreement in The Guardian and The Times and he was criticised for failing to mention that Britain was heading towards recession. Brown’s causality narrative, in which he exogenised blame and failed to accept that he or the British regulatory structure had a role in causing the crisis, was refuted by all three major papers. Despite this, in all three papers Brown was praised for taking a leading role in the Europe-wide fiscal stimulus and reports were cautiously optimistic about Brown’s ability to lead on global regulatory reform—which they all agreed was the key to preventing another major global financial crisis.

The Mais Lecture is an annual speech delivered by the Chancellor of the Exchequer about the current state and future prospects of the UK economy. The 2008 Mais Lecture was delivered after the precipitous fall in world financial markets in September 2008 triggered by the US financial services firm Lehman Brothers filing the largest bankruptcy claim in US history. Domestically, the FTSE 100 had hit a five-year low and the UK Office of National Statistics had announced that Britain was on the brink of a recession.

Unsurprisingly, Darling portrayed the severity of the crisis in starker terms than he had before September 2008. He continually emphasised the speed at which the global financial crisis had manifested and declared that ‘the UK, as well as other countries, is moving into recession’. Despite Darling’s portrayal of a more severe crisis, however, and economic commentators’ increasingly gloomy predictions of the future, Darling neither accepted any personal responsibility for the crisis nor attributed any blame to endogenous actors. Rather, he continued to exogenise blame—focused predominately on global factors but also on the British banking industry. Darling also diminished the regulatory record of previous governments: ‘looking back over 30 years of Mais lectures, I see many attempts to find solutions to domestic problems. But one aspect of modern policymaking which seems to have been understated is the impact of global events.’

Darling criticised the global economic governance system led by the major international financial institutions (IFIs), and even accepted blame, albeit very indirectly, as he claimed that the world’s major nations had ‘for too long…acted as an elite’. This criticism of the ‘world’s major nations’, which undoubtedly included Britain, was noteworthy in so much as it was an angle completely absent from Brown’s crisis-exploitation narrative. It appeared that Darling was diffusing blame across the major economies, thereby accepting slightly more blame on the Labour Government’s behalf than the Prime Minister, although indirectly and still very little. Darling claimed that the radical fiscal stimulus was not an admission of the failure of the ‘marketist’ economic paradigm that the government had adhered to since 1997. Rather, Darling portrayed it as a logical development and renewed his commitment to open markets, referencing economist J. M. Keynes: ‘it is right that the conduct of policy should evolve. Just as markets change, so should policy. As Keynes said, “when the facts change, I change my mind”.’ Ultimately, Darling asserted that a global solution to worldwide regulatory failure was the most important policy that must be achieved in years to come.

Darling’s address received a fair amount of press coverage. The Times pilloried Darling’s severity narrative, describing the Mais Lecture as ‘a Panglossian exercise in making the best of where we are now. It should have been subtitled a study in ambiguity’ (Riddell 2008b). Darling’s exogenisation of the causality of the crisis came under similarly heavy attack from the Financial Times: ‘Alistair Darling tried hard last night to deflect the blame from his immediate predecessor for scrapping the rules on which Gordon Brown once rested the government’s economic credibility’ (Eaglesham 2008). For his policy proposals, however, Darling received sympathetic criticism from The Guardian, which claimed that the Mais Lecture was a mediocre performance constrained by the rotten legacy of Brown’s chancellorship (see Guardian 2008). The Times, too, condemned Darling’s address for ‘its vagueness in indicating a way forward’ and its failure on all three aspects of economic policy: fiscal, monetary and regulation (Times 2008). Overall, then, each aspect of Darling’s crisis exploitation in his Mais Lecture was negatively received.

By the beginning of 2009, an interesting contextual change in the relationship between King, Darling and Brown had occurred. The crisis-exploitation narrative that had been fairly unified was becoming discordant. Amid a spiralling decline in the British economy—high joblessness, low consumer demand (reflected by record low interest rates) and a plummeting currency value—King had begun intimating that he, Brown and Darling had all been partly responsible for the emergence of the United Kingdom’s financial turmoil. After Brown’s announcement of a second stimulus package the day before King’s speech, the press reported that King disapproved of any potential further fiscal stimulus by the government. This put Brown in a defensive position because, without the fiscal tools of handouts and tax breaks, he would have to rely more on the monetary policy of the BOE. Hence, King’s statements during this period became not only discordant from Brown’s, but more overtly political.

Some parts of King’s crisis rhetoric remained conventional: he declared that ‘2009 will be a difficult year for all of us’, he maintained that global factors were primarily responsible for the crisis and he portrayed the crisis as a leviathan beyond the control of any single national regulatory system. The speech was, however, in some key aspects a distinct break from King’s past crisis-framing efforts. Perhaps the most salient discontinuity was King’s admission that before the Northern Rock crisis there had been some failings in the UK regulatory system—a system that might have contributed to the emergence of financial strife in Britain and in which he played an integral role. King stated that ‘it is clear that policy did not succeed in preventing the development of an unsustainable position’ in which the United Kingdom now found itself. Although this was only a guarded acceptance of partial responsibility for the crisis, it stood in stark contrast with the unwavering denial of culpability that Brown and Darling had maintained since September 2007. Hence, while the earlier part of King’s speech characterised the global financial crisis as being too serious for any single national regulatory authority to prevent, his admission indicated that the UK response to the global financial crisis had not been as rapid or effective as it could have been.

The speech received a considerable amount of coverage in the major newspapers. The opinion of King’s severity narrative was mostly negative. All papers agreed with the now widespread public view that the crisis was the most severe in more than half a century, but disagreed with King’s rose-tinted portrayal of unemployment and credit easing. In the week or so after the speech, King’s causality narrative received little attention, probably because King had mentioned that there were flaws in the UK regulatory system during a number of doorstop interviews and press releases in the weeks before the speech. Taking into consideration the press coverage of these minor speech acts, the papers overwhelmingly agreed with what they considered a long-overdue admission of responsibility from the governor. There was not much coverage of King’s policy proposals, but the Financial Times was in agreement with King that wages had to be restrained in order to combat inflation.

Brown’s speech of 26 January was delivered at a time when the public was becoming increasingly aware that the foundations of the UK economy were not as strong as Brown and his government had initially portrayed. The European Commission had forecast on 19 January that the UK economy would not only enter recession, it would contract significantly—by 2.8 per cent in 2009—and would then recover only marginally in 2010 (Gow 2009). Also on 19 January, Brown had announced a second stimulus package of £50 billion.

Brown’s speech reflected the increasingly gloomy state of the UK economy and further maximised the severity of the global financial crisis. Brown conjured florid metaphors of ‘storms’ and ‘hurricanes’ to describe the forces battering the UK economy. Brown stated that ‘the sheer scale and speed of recent events makes this no ordinary crisis’. Brown also reiterated his previous statements that promoted the UK economy as among the best equipped to endure financial turmoil, by stating that ‘Britain is better placed to benefit as the storm passes’.

Brown continued to deny that the government’s regulatory regime was responsible for the crisis. He witheringly described the financial regulatory regime before 1997 as archaic and asserted that only Labour’s revolutionary post-1997 reforms had made British financial regulation effective. Brown declared, however, that no national regulatory framework—not even one as effective as Britain’s—could have prevented the unprecedented global financial crisis. Only through an international system of financial regulation could the global financial crisis have been forestalled. The Prime Minister’s policy solutions remained focused on achieving the ‘radical reform of our global financial system’ (Webster and Duncan 2009).

Surprisingly, the speech did not receive much press coverage; only The Times published articles relating to the Prime Minister’s crisis framing in the days after the speech. The paper quoted polls showing that ‘58 per cent…of people…believe he [Brown] is refusing to acknowledge the full depth of the crisis’ (Webster and Duncan 2009), and further expressed criticism for Brown’s causality narrative: ‘Gordon Brown is fond of emphasising that the recession is global, and that it was made in America. But as massive deleveraging takes place around the world, it has become clear that the UK economy was one of the most overleveraged in the world’ (Times 2009a).

It is hard to gauge from the limited newspaper coverage the overall support for Brown, although the few available articles were not very supportive of him. This comports with the polls at the time, which indicated that Brown’s deficit to Cameron in the polls had increased to 9–14 points, from 1–7 points just one month earlier, in December 2008 (UK Polling Report 2009).

Coming only two weeks after Brown’s previous major speech act, this address was important, not for any specific shift in the framing of the UK and global financial crises, but because it provoked a significant media reaction. There were two significant contextual developments in the two weeks between speeches. First, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had declared on 28 January that the United Kingdom would be among the countries worst affected by the global financial crisis, revising its previous forecast of a 1.3 per cent contraction to 2.8 per cent (Kollewe 2009a). Second, the BOE Governor, Mervyn King, had, since late 2008, been noticeably less critical of British banks and other financial intuitions. Instead, he had started to describe, albeit in vague terms, that the banks were not alone in their failure to prevent the crisis. This led to much media speculation that there was a rift between King and Brown.

In this speech, Brown continued to make the most of the global financial crisis and exogenise its causes. Additionally, like all of his speeches since 2007, this speech again advertised Brown’s strong credentials for achieving global financial reform and made use of the same historical analogy—the creation of the Bretton Woods institutions. In fact, in this speech, he expanded the analogy of the postwar economic reconstruction by referencing the Marshall Plan and describing it as a revolutionary fiscal stimulus package that brought the European and world economies back from the brink of ruin to the longest boom in modern economic history, from 1945 until the 1973–74 global recession. Thus, the analogy could be seen as a defence of the large fiscal stimulus Brown had injected into the UK economy and also a pre-emptive justification of future fiscal stimulus by the government, which was widely believed to be forthcoming despite the injection of a second round of £50 billion stimulus into the UK financial system just weeks earlier.

In his speech to the Brookings Institution, Brown also blamed British banks for promoting a culture that rewarded short-term risk over long-term sustainability. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this speech, however, was that for the first time Brown emerged from his hitherto position of denial to admit that there were flaws in the domestic regulatory structure. He then qualified this, however, with the ameliorating line that no country’s regulatory system could have prevented the leviathan global financial crisis.

The three papers all agreed with Brown’s appreciation that the crisis was at this point egregious. The Guardian, however, noted that Brown’s realisation of the severity of the crisis was overdue, saying that his claim that Britain ‘was the victim of international, specifically US, banking problems’ had become a ‘threadbare tale’ (Kettle 2009). The Financial Times also criticised Brown’s causality narrative after recent negative publicity about ‘how the City of London [the hub of the financial sector] was run during Mr Brown’s tenure at the Treasury’ (Financial Times 2009a). The aspect of Brown’s speech on which all three papers critically focused was, however, his plan to cut bonus payments from the banks that had been fully or partly nationalised. All three papers vehemently disagreed with this proposal for various reasons, ranging from The Guardian’s contention that it would punish genuinely creative entrepreneurs to the Financial Times’ opinion that it was a tawdry populist policy that did not address the major problems at the heart of the economy in recession. Overall, then, there was little to no support in the major newspapers for Brown’s severity narrative or causality narratives, or for his policy proposals.

Since Darling’s October 2008 speech, British economic news had been increasingly bleak. At the turn of 2009, the pound had fallen to a historic low against the euro, the jobless figure of 6 per cent was the worst in a decade, the FTSE 100 continued to fall dramatically and the BOE had cut interest rates to the lowest figure in the bank’s 315-year history.

Darling had admitted in his October speech that the United Kingdom was headed for recession. In his address to the Foreign Press Association at the G20 Finance Ministers’ Summit, however, he too put a twist on his old rhetoric of growth, saying that ‘we mustn’t lose sight of [the fact that] the global economy is expected to double, so there’s a huge prize to be won’. This speech is notable because of its heavy use of crisis-exploitation rhetoric. It was particularly strident in identifying global factors as the primary cause of Britain’s financial crisis and global re-regulation as the most important policy to achieve. Again, Darling attempted to shift debate away from the domestic battleground, where the government was being staunchly challenged by the Conservative Party, to an international arena in which the opposition, with no internationally recognised mandate to speak for the UK electorate, could not compete.

Somewhat surprisingly, there was almost no media coverage of Darling’s address to the press contingent at the meeting of G20 finance ministers. As the President of the G20 in 2009, Britain had clearly embraced the G20 as a body that could effectively combat the crisis and effect global financial re-regulation. In the only article that dealt with Britain’s role in the G20, however, The Times was dubious about the government’s embrace of the G20 after ignoring the body for a number of years. ‘Gordon Brown will be chairman of the summit and his enthusiasm for remaking supranational organisations almost invites mockery because the ambitions so far outstrip the amount of work that has been invested in realising them’ (Times 2009b). It was noteworthy that there was a complete absence of specific coverage of Darling’s speech. This suggests that his concerted crisis-exploitation efforts went largely unrecognised by the public.

Amid an escalation in the tension between King and Brown, visible in their media comments since January, the BOE Governor delivered his most significant speech on the continually worsening effects of the global financial crisis. Newspapers had widely reported that UK unemployment had reached a 12-year high of two million people (Hopkins 2009a) and the BOE had again slashed interest rates to another historic low, of 0.5 per cent. This speech, again, represented another shift away from the crisis-exploitation rhetoric of Brown to which King had closely adhered between September 2007 and late 2008.

As in his previous speeches, King maximised the severity of the crisis. At the same time, however, King downplayed the urgency required for the next response to the stagnating—if not worsening—financial situation and instead advised that all key leaders take time to choose the right course of action. This could have been directed at Brown, who had already approved a number of fiscal stimulus packages, as just one week later, on 24 March, King sensationally announced that further fiscal stimulus by the government was inadvisable (Duncan and King 2009; Hopkins 2009b; Wintour 2009).

King’s causality narrative became more nuanced in this speech. King again identified global forces as the primary cause of the crisis—particularly the poor performance of IFIs and the absence of a global regulatory order. King added another layer, however, to his imputation of blame to global forces by criticising the role of creditor and debtor nations in the crisis. He criticised creditor nations for loaning money without pressuring debtor nations to repay and pilloried debtor nations for naively borrowing massive amounts of money, prolonging their repayments and racking up significant public debt. From this criticism, he did not exempt the United Kingdom, which, in Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) terms, had neither high nor low public debt (CIA 2009b).

There was no media coverage of King’s severity narrative or the new strand about creditor and debtor nations in his causality narrative. Only the Financial Times addressed King’s causality narrative in any detail, taking issue with King’s excuse that his inflation targets had not worked because he did not have adequate power to achieve them. Instead, the paper accused King of being a key part of a short-sighted hierarchy that had not adequately prepared for a financial downturn when the economy was booming (Giles 2009). ‘In reality, all three institutions in the so-called tripartite arrangements for financial supervision were culpable in failing to recognise the toxic combination of rapid credit expansion and financial innovation’ (Stephens 2009).

There was, conversely, a plethora of coverage of King’s policy proposals. The papers were unified in their praise for King’s proposals to abolish the banks’ ‘casino’ lending and gambling practices as well as his subtle suggestions for the Prime Minister to avoid further fiscal stimulus. The majority of articles in these three papers, however, criticised King for his pessimism and for talking down the UK economy. King was also criticised for failing to admit that the BOE—not just the FSA and the Treasury—needed to undergo reform to prevent future crises.