You’ll no doubt have heard that Gordon Brown made another “speech of a lifetime” — that’s the one designed to save his skin — at the Labour party conference yesterday.

It didn’t. One of his most senior ministers, Ruth Kelly, resigned almost immediately, apparently calling it “disgusting”.

A number of Secretaries of State were visibly disgusted too. I saw the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, grimacing and fuming on at least two occasions, while leadership contender Alan Johnson seemed as underwhelmed as it’s possible to be without falling asleep.

What is it with Brown that sucks the joie de vivre out of normally jolly fellows? It could be his utter lack of sparkle, his emptiness of content, the inability to create one line of English that resonates, uplifts and galvanises an audience.

The speech was one long litany of Soviet-style platitudes of the kind that used to come from half-dead men in raincoats and porkpie hats on the Kremlin balcony.

Of course, he doesn’t describe himself like that. He claims to be a free-marketeer and free-trader. This double-edged approach is called “triangulation” — saying one thing to one set of people, while “dog-whistling” something else to an inner clique or clientele.

To make matters worse, he peppered his turgid oration with small, pathetic giveaways to various sections of the population. A bribe here, an inducement there. I wouldn’t have been surprised had he offered free black puddings to university students, or gratis bobble hats to pensioners.

Gordon Brown seems to enjoy presiding over a Father Christmas society, with himself as Santa Claus. It’s a pity that taxpayers have to pick up the bill for his bogus charity.

I won’t comment on the gimmicks in the speech, the one joke, or using his charming wife as cheerleader while pledging he would never expose his family for publicity purposes.

Let’s just say that this speech was the final nail in the boot that will kick him out in due course. It addressed none of the problems of the country — the UK is around a year behind the U.S in the economic cycle. The meltdown on Wall Street and the desperate fight for rescue packages are still to arrive here.

Brown has absolutely no idea what to do about any of it. He’s only interested in protecting his back from his colleagues in the Cabinet, while dismissing any responsibility for the home-grown economic mess.

It’s very hard to be upbeat when writing about Gordon Brown, so I’ll conclude this piece with an apparently true anecdote about a Prime Minister with a similar style to his — let’s pretend it’s him.

The PM is ruminating with friends about his first ever Cabinet meeting as Prime Minister.

“I couldn’t understand it at all,” he said. “They came in and I gave them their orders. Then they wanted to sit down and discuss them.”

It could be, couldn’t it? Actually it was the Duke of Wellington.

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I don’t suppose you’ve thought much about sausages lately. You should, sausages can be very instructive.

Many people buy supermarket sausages, but most of us prefer not to know what’s in them.

Put them in a pan and the aroma is so lip-smackingly enticing we would forgive our butchers almost anything. The smell arises from a cleverly assembled mixture of herbs and spices designed by food technologists to whet our appetities and taste buds before we’ve even bitten into the succulent pink objects they create for us. In food terms they really are masters of the universe.

If, however, we decide to delve into the innards of these encased and elongated meatballs, we get a completely different picture. For the contents are blended into a reddish goo in which excessive fat is made palatable by chemicals called emulsifiers. The meat itself is sliced and diced from every part of an animal’s carcass, including the bits we don’t normally talk about. If you think you’ve never eaten eyes or testicles or intestinal matter, think on, they are there on your breakfast plate every morning.

The point I’m making — somewhat ellipically — is that most of the old financial system is a dog’s breakfast.

Derivatives in particular, especially asset-backed structured vehicles (what a mouthful for a packet of sausages) bear a great deal of similarity to their culinary equivalents. The minced mush is largely made up of bits of sub-prime mortgages squashed together with a few half-decent ones. The alluring aroma is added by the blue-chip rating agencies, while the packaging is designed by investment bankers — who paradoxically have now almost ceased to exist.

Who would have thought that in 2008 we could make a credible comparison between sausage-makers and the high-flying gadabouts of the celestial world of brokerage and financing.

Today we hear that the two surviving giant American investment banks, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, have turned themselves into “holding banks”, which will allow them to beg on the streets for any deposits we the people may have remaining after their Attila the Hun rampage through our domestic balance sheets. They will also gain access to Government funds designed to bail out the banks.

In common parlance, Goldman and Morgan and the other stricken titans are signing on the dole.

Of course, most of the movers and shakers have already salted away their massive bonuses and are probably even now relaxing with a cocktail or two on their yachts in Monte Carlo harbour.

They have left us with a colossal mountain to climb. In the UK, house prices have a further 25-30 percent to fall, according to Roger Bootle, and already Britain’s largest mortgage lender, HBOS, has failed. How many other banks will go before we hit bottom?

Who, then, are the people that created this vastly complex set of financial instruments based on the always-temporary phenomenon of rapidly-rising asset prices? And who were their managers who let them do it?

It appears that a large number of them are alumni of the Harvard Business School, even those working in Britain and Europe. President Bush is one of them. British PM Gordon Brown has surrounded himself with such types for more than a decade.

U.S. Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson, once CEO of Goldman Sachs, is a member of this esoteric band of brothers. Not surprisingly, his main effort currently is to package up all the bad debts of the banking sector into one giant sausage and dump it into the arms of the taxpayer. Not only have the public been fleeced by the Harvard Templars, they have to pay off their debts as well.

Unfair though that may seem I’m aware that it is probably the only way to save world financial markets. The “flight to safety” from U.S Treasury funds mid-week was the Crack of Doom approaching at violent speed. A dollar default was much nearer than any of us imagined.

Here’s a suggestion to the politicians working on better regulation for the City of London, Wall Street and Frankfurt. Item one in the new schedule: Never employ anyone with an MBA from Harvard.

That includes David Miliband, tipped as Britain’s next Prime Minister if Gordon Brown falls before the next General Election.

Have a nice lunch. It won’t come free. Avoid the sausages.

The crashing of America’s giant investment banks is beginning to sound like an Amazonian logging operation.

In quick succession Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch have all gone south to the lumberjacks. Of the Masters of the Universe, only Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs survive.

For how long?

With CDOs (Collateralized Debt Obligations) having poisoned the world’s financial system, like seeping toxic waste, a new danger is now forming on the horizon.

CDSs (Credit Default Swaps — insurance policies for bonded commercial IOUs), which are out there in their billions, are beginning to crumble in the face of massive defaults.

The world’s biggest insurer AIG is already in Lehman-style retreat — its shares plummeted by 70 percent in early trading yesterday — as is the monoline AMBAC. The CDS crisis is now with us. When optimistic Anatole Kaletsky of The Times (London) says we are getting into 1930s territory, you know we have a serious problem.

So what precisely are CDSs and how will their demise affect most of us in coming days, weeks, months and years?

George Soros estimates that the value of CDSs now equals half of U.S. household wealth, an almost unimaginable number, now put at $58 trillion.

CDSs are hedges made by investors in case a company defaults on its debts. In effect you bet on a company failing to protect your investment in the event it does just that.

The problem arises when large numbers of companies go bust and the CDSs themselves become worthless since no-one can pay them out.

A CDS seller undertakes to compensate a buyer if a corporate bond defaults. Since there is no limit to the size of cover taken out, the value of CDSs often exceeds a company’s debts.

Moreover, many CDSs are bought with borrowed money so the infection of the system drives deep into the financial heartland like veins in a blue cheese.

The danger now is debt deflation: a rapid reversal of debt issuance, or deleveraging as it is called.

Tim Congdon of the London School of Economics says, “Banking system capital is being wiped out. The risk is that this could lead to a contraction of credit and set off a self-reinforcing downward spiral, leading to the sort of debt-deflation we saw in the 1930s.

“It is already clear that money growth has ground to a halt over the past three months. We must prevent it from actually contracting. If the Fed and European Central Bank don’t cut interest rates soon, it is going to be a problem.”

The Bank of England’s rigid inflation target, set by Gordon Brown when inflation was low, is now a millstone around Governor Mervyn King’s neck at a time when energy, food and commodity price rises are being imported from global markets.

The Eurozone is similarly caught in a time warp relating to Germany’s neurotic fear of hyperinflation. Add the growing divergence between euro economies and a far deeper than necessary downturn is guaranteed for Western European countries.

America, which is free from those constraints, already has 2 percent interest rates. It is, however, suffering a double blow: the fading of the effect from the summer fiscal stimulus and a loss of export competitiveness as the dollar rises.

What began as bad government, worse regulation, grasping banks, financial structures that lacked resilience because they were built on sand, has turned into a perfect storm that is about to come ashore and swallow much of our familiar financial and economic landscapes.

As we wrote here a year ago, while the current triple crises are different from the 1930s, and may not bite so deep, the damage will take just as long to repair.

When a bubble of such exuberant overconfidence bursts, the fallaway has to be profound before a new wave can summon enough energy to restart the cycle.

What consolations can we find among this heap of misery? As usual Einstein has a thoughtful response:

“We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.”

Happy enthusiasm.

It’s been decided. Gordon must go … painfully.

Such is the extent of his crimes against humanity, the nation, the planet, and especially the Labour Party, the biggest jury ever assembled has decreed he must suffer death by a thousand cuts.

Even the political commentators — who are finding it hard to reinterpret the death throes of this man’s career in new and original ways — were virtually unanimous this weekend on his ultimate fate. Only one that I read put up a lukewarm defence: Peter Oborne in Saturday’s Mail. But there was something weary and attenuated about his piece.

For a more red-blooded approach “Pollygate” takes some beating. The Guardian’s Pollygamous lapdancing correspondent (if Richard Littlejohn is to be believed) was immortalized by parliamentary round-robin, when her extended version of the last rites was circulated by email to every sitting Labour MP. Imagine opening an email and discovering a thousand words by Polly Toynbee on your BlackBerry. Spam doesn’t begin to cover it.

Over at its sister paper, The Observer, Andrew Rawnsley patrolled his now familiar beat, Gordon must go … Oh, the tedium of it.

Turning right into the Telegraph offices, even Gordon’s editor for his new book on “Britishness” (Heaven preserve us!), Matthew d’Ancona, gave the old screw another twist, albeit with just a modicum of concern. Heads and brick walls, Matthew.

Melanie Phillips takes up the baton in this morning’s Mail. It’s a war of attrition now. “The strategy is to undermine Brown by withdrawing support on the Labour benches to such an extent that ministers have no alternative but to wield the knife upon the stricken Prime Minister, and put him and the party out of their misery. … [T]he public is simply sick to death of the whole lot of them.”

The Grim Reaper, it seems, in the person of creepy John Reid, who could teach Vladimir Putin a thing or two, is hovering in the background like a Glaswegian Brutus. He may even decide to stand against Brown. What, another Scotsman? He wouldn’t pass the Paxo Test.

This whole scenario is taking on the form of one of Shakespeare’s more gruesome theatrical extravaganzas. Maybe the party should hire Trevor Nunn as a directorial consultant and be done with it.

In keeping with the theatre noir mood music, Peter McKay talks of Viking funerals, and paraphrases the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Gordon thought he could reap Tony’s seed, keep his wealth, wear the robes he’d weaved and bear the arms he’d forged.”

Not so sure about Tony’s seed though.

Back at the now intensely compelling Guardian, Andrew Marr’s missus Jackie Ashley writes, “The Labour party could be on the verge of destruction. Out of money, and facing an electoral smash and a massive factional fallout, it may not survive as a major political force.”

On Gordon himself she reports, “In private he brims with enthusiasm about child poverty, perinatal mortality in Sierra Leone, and the impact of rising food prices in China.”

Perinatal mortality in Sierra Leone? Says it all, doesn’t it? Out of the mouths of babes and Guardian columnists …

The ever-dependable William Rees-Mogg in The Times has, “Labour’s best hope lies with the Palin effect. Gordon Brown is guilty of boring the nation. His party should look to its women to make itself interesting again.”

But where is a Sarah Palin in the massed ranks of Labour wimmin? The Blair babes are like Gordon, ideological nutcases and social engineers working on the principle that they know best how the rest of us should live, despite the deficiencies in their own lives.

Sarah Palin speaks from real experience learned in the harshest of environments. By contrast, Labour females have the odour of insipid British local government hung about them.

Rees-Mogg revisits his championing of Harriet Harman — Labour’s Hillary — but also adds Ruth Kelly to his shortlist who would swing a bit of interest back towards the Labour Party. I agree, but in both cases it would be accompanied by national derision.

The unsmiling Harman is too frosty and way too feminist, while newly-glamorized Ruth Kelly has a most unfortunate accent that drains her presence of seriousness. An election campaign filled with her drone and Labour’s cacophony of glottal stops would drive us all potty.

Sarah Palin is the nearest America has come to finding a Margaret Thatcher. She explodes onto a stage and holds her audience by the force of her personality and the “wow” effect when she articulates positions that resonate naturally in the minds of her listeners.

She probably reminds Americans of Mark Twain and Henry David Thoreau who spoke with folksy common sense in an aura of spirituality. That’s why she’s beating the pants off wonky, cerebral Obama. It’s the psychology, stupid.

Does anyone imagine Harman or Kelly speaking to the British soul as does the Last Night of the Proms?

Margaret Thatcher did. Sarah Palin does in America.

Janet Daley in the Telegraph nails it when she urges David Cameron to begin speaking for the nation. “Shouldn’t the voters be made to feel that there is a prospective Prime Minister who is not playing this game purely for party advantage and is actually prepared to speak up on their behalf?”

Silence is often interpreted as conspiracy.

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