Reading through today’s Sunday papers feels like surveying the aftermath of the battle of the Somme. Around 20,000 British soldiers lost their lives there on the first day alone. A further 30,000 were wounded. Gordon Brown must surely count himself one of the walking wounded after recent events and may even be wondering if he hasn’t died and gone to hell.

He should take heart from those who went before. To historians, desperate situations are more interesting than great victories. They throw up extraordinary characters and tales of heroism against the odds.

Leaders are rarely magnanimous in victory — as Churchill urged them to be. Mostly they lord it up and preen in their assumed glory. A back against a wall reveals more of the moral fibre of anyone than easy accomplishment. Churchill himself is the perfect example.

So what can Brown do now to escape the deep, dangerous hole he finds himself occupying?

He can soldier on, of course, crying out his familiar very-sub-Shakespearean mantras: “Carry on with the job. Long-term decisions. Global solutions. International action … etcetera. He should face up to the fact that oratory and original thought are not his for the taking in this dark night of the soul.

Just hanging on in there, though, is a perilous position for him. It would surrender the initiative to his enemies. In effect he would be placing his fate in the hands of every opponent who has a grudge against him — and there are many.

On the other hand, he could simply resign. Walk away from his troubles as if they never existed. Retire to the life he loves, of books, academia and history.

Ah, history! Wouldn’t it remind him of how little he achieved as Prime Minister, how dismally he is placed in the league table of British leaders? At least Anthony Eden won a general election before he impaled himself on the bayonet of Suez. Harold Wilson won three elections in his long march to the bankruptcy of Britain. Clement Attlee won a landslide victory and didn’t remain long enough to see out the economic disaster that resulted from his Marxist nationalisation spree.

No, Gordon would be rated one of the worst Prime Ministers of all, mainly because he brings his many failures as Chancellor with him. His honeymoon to hopeless clown within 12 months is hard to match in recent history.

That doesn’t leave many options for our unhappy leader, does it? Well, yes, it leaves one. Big, brave and gloriously counter-intuitive, Gordon could confound the lot of us by emulating Marshall Foch.

When French HQ radioed Foch and asked for his position at a crucial battle in World War I, he replied, “My centre is giving way, my right is in retreat. Situation excellent. I shall attack.” And attack he did, taking the enemy completely by surprise.

If I were Gordon I would announce an immediate general election. It should be in the minimum timeframe possible — three weeks on Thursday — the Labour Party has no money left to fight an election. Who cares? Who needs useless posters stuck up everywhere? As Prime Minister he would command all the screen time he wanted. Minor expenses could be funded from the few usual suspects remaining, including a couple of friendly unions. The fact that it is August could work for him if he plays his hand astutely.

He would instantly backfoot both the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, who would not be prepared for an election. He would begin to win plaudits from the papers and political commentators for his “courage” — and not before time. The electorate would grudgingly admire his pluck — a favourite quality for the British. Many would see him anew, and admiration would not be far away. As an underdog, the Brits would line up behind him again in increasing numbers. He would be the talk of the town. Even David Cameron would have difficulty in matching the fighting, no-more-boring Mr Brown.

But would he win? I doubt it. The best he could do would be to claw back some support to deny the Tories the landslide they now see beckoning.

If he could close the gap to a 30, 40, 50 seat majority for the Conservatives, he would be a hero in Left-liberal circles and a formidable Leader of the Opposition. The newly energized Labour ministerial team might clean up against a tentative and inexperienced Treasury bench. David Cameron would be hard-pressed to gain traction for his new administration of which so much is expected.

Of course, Brown could crash out badly and be forced to resign anyway. But at least he would have fought his corner with attempted distinction and gone down in a fanfare of glory. The Charge of the Brown Brigade against impossible odds. The Brits would love it.

That may be the best he can hope for.

Gordon Brown, British Prime Minister, First Lord of the Treasury, Leader of the Labour Party, former Chancellor of the Exchequer, has had surprisingly few titles in his long 11 years in government. Some Minsters have managed to accrue almost one a year to embellish their CVs and Who’s Who entries.

Maybe he deserves another to plump out his list, even if it is an honorary gong going forward.

The title I have in mind has been available to him ever since the local elections in May and the loss of London to David Cameron’s Tories. It should certainly have been collected after the disastrous debacle in Labour’s safe seat of Crewe and Nantwich. Now, following yesterday’s cataclysmic implosion in the East End of Glasgow — the very soul of Labour’s heartland — we’re going to pin it on his chest whether he likes it or not.

Her Majesty’s Leader of the Opposition Designate.

Not that he will linger in his new job when his party is wiped out Canadian-meltdown style in the next General Election. You can be sure he will step down from politics the moment he concedes defeat. A son of the manse who built a reputation for pulling rabbits out of hats will find the absence of hats very hard to bear. Latterly, even the rabbits have deserted him.

For Gordon was the man who, as Chancellor, forged a glittering Cityscape of infrastructure to celebrate his achievements. The Golden Rule that borrowing should be for “investment” only, not for consumption. As a man without a moment’s experience of commerce in his entire life, his idea of investment was more, and yet more, state clutter.

His Borrowing Rule and his Financial Regulator were equally flawed. He’s had to send in his chief ghillie to slice them up for breakfast after they all dropped dead at the same time. Gordon’s smoke and mirrors have disappeared in a big puff of smoke.

Like many, I sometimes get a twinge of conscience in seeming so beastly to a one-eyed man who has pursued his partial vision with commendable vigour for so long. Then I recall that his 1970s-style economics was aimed at creating a client state that would, in theory, always vote Labour. The same was true for mass immigration.

The list of betrayals goes on. Signing away the country to a foreign power (as the EU will be after the Lisbon Treaty) against the wishes of a large majority of the British, and ratting on the promise of a referendum. Selling seats in the upper chamber of Parliament, and other honours, for party funding — he denied knowledge of this outrage but no-one believes him …

Eventually you get weary of compiling inventories of Brown’s failings, treacheries, errors of judgement and betrayals of trust. Like many obsessives, he bores by excess.

The electorate has already spoken. Will he go of his own volition? Brown’s tragedy is that he has no hinterland, nowhere else to go. To him, politics and life are one. Even the books he occasionally writes are intended to burnish his career prospects. Silly little tomes about courage, from a man who conspicuously has little of it. He has been labelled “yellow” by his opponents.

But he won’t go unless pushed and the Labour Party doesn’t cut down its leaders. It’s the long stalemate before checkmate.

Rudyard Kipling had a prescient little verse for our Leader of the Opposition Designate:

There’s a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Khatmandu,
There’s a little marble cross below the town;
There’s a broken-hearted woman tends the grave of Mad Carew,
And the Yellow God forever gazes down.

Cartoon by Peter Brookes

Yesterday I heard the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown — speaking from the G8 conference in Japan — make one of the weirdest statements I’ve ever heard from a head of government.

He said, and I paraphrase from memory: “Each family in Britain throws away £8 ($16) worth of food every week. We have to tackle this on a global basis.”

Allowing for possible editing of the clip and the deficiencies of my memory box, it is incomprehensible until you remember that our man Gordon thinks everything has to be dealt with globally. Even, it seems, what to do with curling up sandwiches.

Apart from “long-term solutions”, global and globally are his favourite words, and never very far from his lips.

So let’s take the statement at its face value. Each family … £8 of food. Maybe that has something to do with the sell-by dates added by supermarkets and food manufacturers. Is that a problem for the Galactic Council?

The BBC had an unintentionally hilarious live broadcast from one British city’s rubbish tip. The reporter excitedly told us that behind him was all the food that the good burghers of said city had thrown away that day. The pile was about the size of my compost heap.

What startles me about Brown’s words is firstly his small-minded, nitpicking approach to the current inflation in food prices, which then balloons out to “global solutions”.

My interpretation? He knows he can’t solve the myriad of minor problems at home — he’s had ten years to do it — so he parades himself as a “global player,” an activist on the world stage.

But then that was always the way with the Blair-Brown joint premiership. Their main interests and efforts have always been for Africa or Europe, or sorting out the Middle East. Internationalism precedes nation, global takes precedence over the problems of the homeland.

It’s a classic case of inflatus, brought on by incompetence and lack of empathy with their own country. They have never “batted for Britain”.

The G8 has become a worthless jamboree for performing heads, one eye on the domestic audience, another on their own perceived global importance. It’s yet another failed attempt to develop a “World Government”.

Leaders like Brown should muse on the fact that if national governance is so difficult, how much less worthwhile it is to create regional and global institutions which take on the same tasks — like complaining about folk chucking away a few ancient pizzas.

Is the G8 past its sell-by-date? Gordon Brown certainly is.

Remember the old song that begins: “Happy days are here again, The skies above are clear again, So let’s sing a song of cheer again, Happy days are here again.”?

You don’t need to be a grumpy old puritan to be thankful that a decade of overindulgence, bubble following bubble, and preening egos fed by Cheshire cat politicians whose every error is concealed by good economic tidings, is finally and emphatically over. But can we really squeeze some happy juice from the remaining husks of our collapsing economies and even Western civilization itself?

You bet we can. We’ll start small — just to get you in the mood.

Andy Wood, chief executive of Adnams, a brewing and hotels business, is quoted thus in today’s UK Telegraph : “… throughout East Anglia we are seeing fewer cars on the roads … That’s just one example. There are fewer people going to pubs and they are also spending on different things.”

Isn’t that what almost everyone has been working towards for years — fewer cars on the roads? And is he hinting at a curtailment of binge drinking, which has become a serious social problem in Britain? Coming from a brewer, that must carry weight.

In England, we were recently informed that unregulated immigration from Eastern Europe, thanks to the EU, and the same from the rest of the world, thanks to the Newish Labour government, would double our population in 30-40 years. Considering our population density is already ten times that of the United States, four times France’s and three times Germany’s, that would be a disaster and leave the country unrecognizable even to its own.

Now the word on the street is that half the East Europeans have left as employment dries up and the exchange rate becomes less favourable for them to send money home. The same is beginning to happen with all immigration as the government tightens up on benefits and entry restrictions, mainly, one surmises, to save money.

Better still, the twin projects of a government lacking coherence and competence, while simultaneously pursuing programmes of social engineering unparalleled outside the old communist world, are now exposed as lethal and highly unrewarding. Gordon Brown, a shambling, frightened figure these days, embodies the imminent death of this unhealthy movement. And it took the collapse of the economy to do it. We may regard that as a small price to pay.

I’m guessing that similar scenarios can be found in most other Western countries. In America, for example, where a liberal-left Presidential candidate has a real chance of victory, will a hard-pressed people vote for an untried, although worthy, man whose sketchy manifesto to date closely resembles Blair’s and Brown’s of a decade ago? Won’t they prefer the experience of an older man offering more of a hair shirt approach to the nation’s finances?

The greatest benefit of recessions is that they shake out the incompetent and the wasteful. Companies that should never have received the support of banks or private equity firms fall apart under the weight of highly-leveraged debt. It causes much hardship, of course, but it brings us collectively back to earth and to honest and careful accounting.

Foolhardy projects, like the euro-currency zone and the EU constitution, are revealed for what they are: the expensive fantasies of puffed-up politicians. They may just survive, unfortunately, but they will not be taken seriously in future, and the likelihood is that they won’t exist in ten years.

And what of all those little luxuries we’ve got used to during the past decade of higher disposable incomes? I always did prefer a measure of ebony tea in a cracked mug to a latte in a supercool coffee shop.

We may have had access to all manner of entertainments across a dizzying array of platforms, but in our exuberance we just didn’t notice that most of it was not very good.

Let’s face it, the good times are only really great in retrospect. As one who lived through the 1980s boomtimes in London, I recall them with some relish. On closer inspection, though, I can dimly remember the frustrations and problems too. What on earth did I do with all that money?

As a certain French general used to say, every weakness in your position can be turned to your advantage. That’s the spirit in which I approach the coming era of austerity.

How about you?