If anyone can be said to be enjoying the awful financial crisis it is Gordon Brown. No 10 erupts at my mention of the word “enjoyment” – it’s unbecoming to take pleasure in our woes – but all the same one source close to the prime minister boasts he has visibly “come into his own”. The message comes loud and clear that Brown believes this is his Churchillian hour, the moment for which his ministerial career, his hours of study and his hard work have prepared him.

“It’s the global economy, stupid,” the prime minister tells me. If he can show leadership to the world by example, if he can prove that his package to rescue the banks is a blueprint for stability, Brown can hope to be hailed as the saviour of the financial system. Globalisation is having, in his words, “teething troubles” so it needs to be nursed through to a new financial order.

And another trifling matter: Brown’s electoral fortunes might revive too. The polls are beginning to narrow from the days of extravagant 20-point Tory leads.

The prime minister wants to prove it is he, not David Cameron, who is the “man with a plan”. His ambitions extend beyond coordinating the response of the G7 group of western countries tottering amid the crisis to a wider deal with the oil suppliers.

Because the price of a barrel has dived from $145 to below $80, Opec, the petroleum producers’ cartel, is proposing to cut production to jack up prices. Brown aims to convince the Arabs and their friends that by plunging the West into recession they will ultimately harm their own economies. Far better to invest their profits in the green energy before the wells dry up. The prime minister has called a summit in London of oil consumers and producers for December 17 that follows the groundwork he laid in Jeddah in June.

“Remember you are mortal,” as the slave reminded Roman generals in their triumphs. And in this case the campaign is not yet won.

As so often in politics, choreography matters. Brown makes a point of looking serene in public, perhaps remembering reports – wrong, as they turned out – that John Major hid under the cabinet table at one point during Britain’s expulsion from the European monetary system. The diaries of Bernard Donoughue, James Callaghan’s special adviser, reflect the burden placed on Denis Healey when Britain faced bankruptcy in 1976. The author is forever searching the chancellor’s face for signs that he is “cracking”, for his eyes were red and moist with sleeplessness and perpetual worry.

Brown lets it be known that he went to bed at 10pm the night before his recovery package was formally announced, so confident was he of its preparation. He found time to speak at the Cheltenham literary festival on Friday. No 10 says he has “an inner calm”. Alistair Darling, too, parades his stiff upper lip. The chancellor left his crisis meeting with the bankers on Monday evening at the Treasury to have a relaxed drink with a few commentators.

It’s just a bit contrived – like that scene from Carry On Up the Khyber when Sid James, as the unflappable governor Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond, refuses to interrupt his dinner party as the marauding Burpas’ (sic) shot and shell falls into the soup.

No 10 is quick to suggest dividing lines with the Tories – so much for national consensus. Brown’s personal ties to European leaders are emphasised – Sarkozy and Merkel especially. The Tory hardline position on the European constitution would isolate Cameron in a crisis like this, it is claimed. As for Brown’s relations with the White House, “contrary to what is sometimes said, President Bush often calls him about economic matters”.

Another big difference between the government and the Tories will come over cuts in health and education. “We made a comprehensive spending package to see us through hard times,” I am told. “The Tories support it but would cut back spending. It requires more borrowing, not cutting education.”

This grandstanding invites the charge of hubris. The prime minister may be getting a little ahead of himself in implying he has turned round the British economy. The voters may see the implications of global turmoil through a glass darkly. But they do understand the poor state of the “real” economy is going to hit their wallets.

Opec may not lie on its back and ask for its tummy to be tickled either. The International Monetary Fund’s gloomy predictions for this country next year and Capital Economics’ miserable forecasts of £100 billion borrowing for each of the next three years mean the new terms of political trade are bad. When challenged, Brown replies, “I’m more interested in the next few days and weeks”, but it is still a case of payment postponed.

The general election of May 2010 is going to be fought against a different background. The blame game about who was responsible for weakening the walls of the British economy upon which the storm broke has been set aside for now, but not for ever.

Cameron’s Conservatives are certainly on the back foot, but steely calm isn’t just for prime ministers. The Tory leader is taking a tip from Barack Obama in America. The Democrat candidate allowed John McCain to rush around boasting of victories on the economy that later turned out to be defeats. Obama hasn’t always had a convincing story on the great crisis but he hasn’t made a fool of himself either.

Mistakes are often made by oppositions nervous that the government is dominating a big story. The only way the Conservatives can barge in is by saying something stupid. A senior Tory says, “We are making no attempt to grab the front page of the newspapers.” The voters, he hopes, will remember Cameron’s judgment and character when it is all over.

His best bet is to connect the great hurricane on Wall Street and the City to Acacia Avenue. The Tories suspect that Brown’s failure to relate to Everyman is terminal. Middle Britain has a better chance of grasping their concrete proposals to raise the limit of bank deposit insurance cover and to help the pensioner who is forced to buy his annuity when stock market prices have collapsed. These are pocketbook issues. Only when he departs from this script, as Cameron did in prime minister’s questions on Wednesday, will Brown’s great clunking fist find its target.

The opposition have to bear the brunt of Brown’s new vigour but the fallout for the Scottish National party may be more severe in the long term. Alex Salmond, the SNP’s wily leader, used to urge his fellow countrymen to join the “arc of prosperity” of Ireland, Norway and Iceland. In the words of Jim Murphy, the new Scottish secretary, this trio looks like “an arc of insolvency”. Improvident Iceland is in the hands of the receivers.

North of the border financial institutions have behaved recklessly. Bank of Scotland bought a much larger English lender, Halifax, claiming it could manage it more aggressively. The BOS emperor had no clothes. And what of Royal Bank and NatWest? A smallish Scottish bank borrowed massively to buy a successful if sluggish English bank. Last week it tanked, helping to trigger a rescue deal underwritten by English taxpayers to save a Scottish-based bank, and indeed (openly in the case of HBOS) Scottish jobs. If a referendum in independence were held tomorrow Salmond would have as much chance of winning as of tossing the caber across the Firth of Forth.

Really bad news is mostly good news for Brown in the short term, but the voters are seldom grateful for services rendered. They pay governments to fix problems and then demand: “What next?” Unless the young Blairites in the cabinet – bright new boy Liam Byrne included – are given space to develop a strategy, the government will lose its way again as it did so disastrously after the floods and foot and mouth emergencies last year.

The prime minister has a love of history: I would remind him that the best political parallel is 1929-32. Most major governments in power in 1929, with the exception of Fascist Italy, fell by 1932.

Brown hopes this financial war will be his equivalent of Margaret Thatcher’s Falklands turnaround of fortunes. Instead he may find that his success will mean all the difference between getting a gold watch or none on his compulsory retirement by the voters in May 2010.

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