A new dawn has broken,” said Tony Blair on May 2, 1997. “Enough of talking. It is time now to do.” This little speech might serve well as a motto for Gordon Brown. He has proved terrible at taking big decisions; look at the botched election last year. Instead he surrounds himself with glut upon surfeit of adviser and consultant and minister, and hunkers down.

Now I am no economist, but it's clear that the one thing the markets have needed all week is certainty, and a lead from the Government. It's also clear that all the experts agreed the Government had little choice but to recapitalise the banks - and the quicker they did it, the better. They have been telling No 10 that for a week. “Everyone knows they're going to have to do it - get on with it,” as Kenneth Clarke said yesterday.

With nothing to get a foothold on, shares were slipping on rumours, particularly in the final 24 hours before the Government announcement - he will bail out the banks; he won't; he might. As I write, we hear that he will - but it may not be announced until the morning, when you are reading this. As the markets cried for certainty, the Government kept talking - and piling on the rumours.

Instead of definitive action, we have had reorganisation. There's been an awful lot of committee work going on in the past week - the setting up of committees, and Cabinets, and sub-cabinets, and advisory councils and the rest - but it took an awfully long time for any decisions to come out of them. As Mr Brown consulted, and the financial world imploded, there was an explosion of discussion forums around No 10, all dithering over the inevitable recapitalisation.

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The Bank and the Treasury believe the move will benefit all banks but many bankers believe other measures will be needed

• British taxpayer to be tied into £50bn bank bailout

The taxpayer will pay in the end

Where will Alistair Darling find £50 billion in a hurry? The answer, inevitably, is from taxpayers

• It’s all very well, ensuring the survival of the banking system, but what’s in it for us?

Take, first, the vast new National Economic Council (NEC). It contains 12 Cabinet ministers, two ministers-who-attend-Cabinet and three other ministers. But it is also supported by a “senior officials working group”, including the permanent secretaries of all the ministers, which is a lot of them, a secretariat of senior staff from the Cabinet Office and Treasury, “regional ministers” (eight more), and 17 “business ambassadors” (these separate from the 18 members of the Business Council who advise the Prime Minister and the Chancellor on “business issues”; there was an international one too for a while but let's keep this local). Blimey. In less-restrained times we could go the whole hog and call this a “government”.

Except that we have had a new one of those this week as well, bigger and better, yeah. The number of ministers-half-in-the-Cabinet (the full Cabinet is restricted to 23) is getting higher as the country collapses: after last week's reshuffle the total number of full and part-time Cabinet ministers rose from 28 to 33. To think that Margaret Thatcher used to manage with a paltry 20 or so. The official list of Her Majesty's Government is now so complicated that it comes with a series of footnotes: “* unpaid”; “** attends Cabinet”; “*** attends Cabinet when ministerial responsibilities are on the agenda”, etc.

Everything is duplicated now. The team of economic advisers that Mr Brown moved to No 10 with him is matched by Alistair Darling's “council of economic advisers” at the Treasury. Mr Darling's Treasury is itself matched by Mr Brown's close ally Shriti Vadera, who has been given a role advising the Prime Minister on economic policy from both the Business Department and the Cabinet Office; and of course by his new best friend, Peter Mandelson, the Business Secretary. Then there's Mervyn King. And Adair Turner...

It wasn't taking a great decision to appoint Peter Mandelson to the Cabinet - it was the avoidance of one. Instead of choosing between the old Blairites and Brownites, deciding on a direction for his Government and following it through, Mr Brown appointed them all! Old Brownites to one side of him, old Blairites to the other. That's not firm government, it's political diarrhoea. And it hasn't impressed the voters. They still think that the Government has run out of steam and it is time for a change. Indeed after all the political and economic excitement of the past month, the Conservative lead has fallen only fractionally.

After the first meeting of the new Cabinet yesterday, what was the clarion call from No 10? “We are of course looking at every aspect with other countries and the financial sector,” said a spokesman as the markets tumbled. “It would be irresponsible to speculate on the specifics of any future options.” We'll keep talking a bit longer. Then we'll brief the press, let some rumours drift out. Eventually we might make an announcement.

Doling out perhaps £50 billion of taxpayers' money to wickedly careless bankers isn't going to be popular and ministers are doubtless concerned about how it will play with the taxpayer. But really, when the alternative is the total collapse of the banking system, there wasn't any choice. So what took them so long?

It's been a similar story in public services around the country for the past year, with progressive public sector leaders complaining that they get no clear lead from No 10 and the Government seems frozen with indecision.

“There were days when they assembled and then promptly dispersed again, frankly admitting to one another that there was not really anything to be done,” wrote George Orwell of the sub-committee of a sub-committee in 1984. “But there were other days... when the argument as to what they were supposedly arguing about grew extraordinarily involved and abstruse, with subtle haggling over definitions, enormous digressions, quarrels, threats, even, to appeal to higher authority. And then suddenly the life would go out of them and they would sit round the table looking at one another with extinct eyes, like ghosts fading at cock-crow.”

Some party. £50 billion! Some new dawn.

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