As the discrepancy between the Brown and Rawnsley versions on the timing of the QE decision shows, Brown is unreliable and dishonest, and embroiders the story in order to exaggerate his own role. The acknowledgements in Beyond The Crisis contain friendly references to a large number of people, including Darling, to whom an "unpayable" debt is said to be owed. Rawnsley presses a different button. According to The End of the Party, in August 2008, when Brown was doing all that reading in Suffolk (and "hating every minute of it" because he "couldn't wait to get to Scotland"), Darling was worrying about his future. In the book's words, "The spinning against [Darling] from within Number 10 was becoming more nakedly aggressive as the Prime Minister's acolytes sought to displace blame for the Government's travails." 

Sadly, people do believe what they read in the newspapers. In the consensus narrative of the Great Financial Crisis, Gordon Brown is something of a hero, because he took on the banks and slew the dragon of finance. But both the consensus narrative and Beyond the Crash are riddled with lies. Brown's reputation owes much to Paul Krugman who, at a pivotal moment in the crisis, praised him in a New York Times column. Krugman even said that the UK's bank recapitalization plan was a model which should be copied in other countries and so would "save the world". However, Krugman — like Brown — has always dismissed money as irrelevant, and during the key period he failed to advocate the easiest and most effective antidote to recession (ie, an increase in the quantity of money).

The introduction of Quantitative Easing  in March 2009 heralded a sharp rebound in the British economy. Absurdly, by spring 2010, Brown entered the general election contest enjoying widespread esteem for his economic competence. The truth is that bank recapitalization exercises and open market operations to boost the quantity of money are totally different approaches to macroeconomic difficulty. Since bank recapitalizations at first reduce the quantity of money, these two purported remedies cannot both be right. If QE had been announced in September 2008 instead of bank recapitalization, the disastrous slide into recession in late 2008 and early 2009 could have been prevented. That is the important lesson to be learned from the events of the period. Brown's cerebrations in a Southwold cottage in the summer of 2008 did not save the world. On the contrary, they were part of the thinking that led to the worst macroeconomic catastrophe that this country has experienced since the 1930s.