It's like rain on your wedding day...

Sir John Major has been speaking out about the looming recession and government attempts to fix the problem. On the Andrew Marr show he said it was "ironic" that Gordon Brown should be heralded as the saviour of the world when the recession is attributable to his own mistakes.

It's an interesting point, but is it ironic? What I think would be more ironic would be, say, if someone who had been Chancellor of the Exchequer who engineered Sterling's entry to the European exchange rate mechanism, after years of pegging the Deutschmark, despite interest rates of 15%, an inflation rate three times higher than Germany's and a boom coming to the end of its cycle. And if that person then became Prime Minister, and spent £27bn of UK reserves shoring up the pound, ultimately failing, and then plunging the UK economy into a recession and housing market crash. And then if that same person had the big brass neck to turn up on TV to tell another Chancellor-turned-Prime Minister where he had gone wrong.

Yes, I think that might be really ironic.