Brown: "we are better prepared than other countries". IMF: "No you're not".

At Wednesday's Guy Fawkes installment of PMQs, David Cameron attacked Gordon Brown with the aid of an EU Commission report forecasting the recession in the UK to be the deepest of any other major EU economy. Unwilling to answer the charge that we are worse prepared than other leading economies, the PM instead chose to mock Cameron for quoting from an EU report:

"That was the only time I have ever heard the right hon. Gentleman quoting the European Commission..... The right hon. Gentleman usually likes to quote the International Monetary Fund, rather than the European Union."

I suspect this may come back to haunt the Prime Minister, for yesterday the IMF predicted that the UK will be the worst hit of the world’s leading rich economies. Not that you'd know from the BBC website; "Credit crunch hits horse owners" and "Disney hit by economic slowdown" are given more prominence than the IMF.