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Our lads at the Treasury will lead this war

Gordon Brown launched his bid yesterday to be not only prime minister of the UK, but premier of the entire world! It was an audacious attempt to leapfrog Tony Blair to the ultimate prize.

He could hardly have chosen a more majestic or propitious setting. The Great Room of the Royal Society of Arts in London is filled with vast murals by James Barry, depicting The Progress of Human Knowledge and Culture, culminating, Barry just failed to add, in The Ascension of Gordon Brown.

In 1783, the artist provided helpful notes. The murals are packed with allegories. The pelican, for instance, feeding its babies with its own blood - what better metaphor for the tax system?

In Elysium, all the greatest minds of history are gathered - Newton, Galileo, Socrates, as if in the VIP enclosure at some awful awards ceremony where they'd forgotten to bring in the drinks. One thirsty celeb resembled the chancellor, though it turned out to be Sir Thomas More.

Over on the east wall, at Commerce, or The Triumph of the Thames, traded goods are borne aloft by naked Nereids, some "more wanton than sportive", according to the painter. It was under their comely forms that the chancellor arrived to give his talk on Meeting the Terrorist Challenge.

His point was that everything else we were concerned about, including globalisation and climate change, depended on overcoming terrorism. And the way to do this? Financial investigation! We had to follow the money. Like fingerprints in the 19th century and DNA in the 20th, he said, so tracing the money around the world would be the tool for ultimate victory.

Of course he had praise for the armed forces, police and intelligence services. But there was no doubt who was leading this great post-cold war struggle: the lads at HM Treasury.

The speech was very long and it was delivered more as a bombardment than an oration. Men in the trenches, I'm told, also kept sane amid the blood and mud by imagining themselves elsewhere, in an idyllic scene. I drifted into a reverie about the new James Bond - 007, licensed to file - in his room at a luxury resort in the Bahamas. There's a knock on the door and a beautiful, bikini-clad, coffee-skinned woman appears.

"My name is Wanton," she says, with a sportive smile, "Wanton Nereid, and I believe you requested a massage."

"Hur, hur, I thought a wanton was a Chinese snack, but you look more like a spring roll ..."

Half an hour later, Bond has returned to a pile of 5,000 bank statements, only just spotting the scorpion the evil al-Qaida double agent Wanton has slipped between the computer printouts. He lies naked and sweating on the bed as the scorpion crawls down towards ...

Sorry. Somehow I yanked my brain back to what Mr Brown was saying. He was talking about the new technology. There were libraries in Japan where they let you take out books using "palm recognition". He mentioned a "trial programme of iris recognition", or "Irish recognition" as he put it. Might have been useful in the 1980s.

Then suddenly he was girdling the earth. The whole world had to gather together to fight al-Qaida culturally. Everyone on the planet had to tackle extremists everywhere, in the Middle East, in Africa, at home. It was a global battle!

And who better to lead it? Even the Nereids looked, briefly, less wanton and more solemn in the presence of the glory to come.

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