Business View: Gordon Brown, the IMF needs you, and Britain needs you to go

The stories that ran on the front pages of Friday's newspapers had an interesting ring to them. Not so much a ring of truth. But a ring of plausibility. Could Gordon Brown quit as Chancellor to take the post of International Monetary Fund managing director? The Treasury wasn't denying it.

I'm here to tell you why Mr Brown should go to the IMF. And why he won't.

The first argument for him going is that he is frustrated as Chancellor and desperate to be Prime Minister. This is leading him to act as a prime minister while he is the Chancellor. This is like the finance director trying to make operational and strategic decisions. If you want to know why that is a bad idea, think of John Mayo and the marvellous job he did of steering Marconi from the back seat of Lord Simpson's Bentley.

In the last couple of years, Mr Brown has tarnished his reputation as the "Iron Chancellor", playing fast and loose with his own fiscal rules while pursuing initiative after initiative outside his bailiwick. He needs to stick to the knitting or get out before he does too much damage.

Second, waiting for Tony Blair to stand aside is a demeaning thing for a man of his stature. Prime ministers do not quit; they go because there are voted out by the electorate (Major, Callaghan) or voted out by their own party (Thatcher) or they are ill (Wilson). Mr Blair seems to be fairly well, he has quelled the dissent in his party and he is riding high in the opinion polls.

Third, the IMF needs Mr Brown. This is a bloated, bureaucratic organisation which seems to be hell-bent on imposing "one size fits all solutions" on all the world's economic problems. Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz (of whom, I'll admit, I am not an uncritical cheerleader) has argued that countries caught in the Asian crisis which followed the IMF's structures - such as Thailand and Indonesia - fared much worse than those which stood up to the IMF - such as South Korea and Malaysia. The IMF desperately needs reforming and the Chancellor looks like the man to do it.

Fourth, the Treasury needs a new approach. With the soon-to-be announced merger of the Inland Revenue and Customs & Excise, an already powerful department becomes a leviathan. Mr Brown has fed the mandarins' love of complexity, so that we are all being afflicted by long and barely comprehensible forms for our tax, benefits and the like, with the result that many of us either pay too much to the Crown or do not claim enough from it.

Finally, Mr Brown has blocked any move for sterling to join the euro. Latvia will be part of the eurozone from next year, but we won't. There are lots of arguments for and against, but for me the most compelling argument is that the currency is here to stay, and there is an inevitability that we will join it one day. We had the opportunity to steer its structure and policy, and we blew it. We will end up being guided by other people's rules, just as we have been in the European Union.

And now why he won't go. For a start, so long as he feels he has any chance of securing the job that has been his life's ambition, the job he sees as rightfully his, he will hang in there waiting for Mr Blair to quit. To go to the IMF would be political suicide. OK, Horst Köhler is going from the IMF to be President of Germany. But that is a largely ceremonial role without much power.

And second, he thinks he is controlling the direction of the Labour Party and the UK Government from his position at No 11 Downing Street. But it's an illusion: Mr Brown is not driving the bus; he just occasionally grabs the wheel.

Allen to have the last laugh at ITV

The ability of Michael Green to steal Charles Allen's thunder from beyond the corporate grave is impressive. But the effect of Mr Green's £15m bonanza will be to strengthen his old adversary's hand at ITV. Mr Allen has already got rid of most of the top Carlton executives and now he has a good chance of kicking out the non-executives. Sir Brian Pitman is already retiring; Etienne de Villiers, who is close to Mr Green and is said to have been a force in making sure he received his whole payout, is clearly on a sticky wicket; and John McGrath, who has his own troubles at Boots, may only survive because there has to be a figleaf of Carlton in the new ITV.

j.nisse@independent.co.uk