"Brown 'relieved' that he can blame somebody else"

From today's Metro:

Gordon Brown admitted that he was greatly relieved that other countries had not monitored banks and that nobody had spotted that he was now rewriting history.

The prime minister said he was glad that financial institutions were not supervised across borders - after ten years in which had done precisely nothing in this regard either.

"We would have dealt with some of these problems, had they not contributed to an illusion of ever rising wealth. So we turned a blind eye to self-certified lending, mortgage multiples of six times income and 125% mortgages, and deliberately ignored the early warning signs of seemingly ever rising house prices" he told BBC Scotland's Politics Show.

"I have never mentioned any of this before. But while we wanted the credit and house price bubbles to go on for ever, other countries did not"

Asked if he had any regrets over his tenure as Chancellor, Mr Brown said "Of course not. I can now blame this on everybody else, despite being Chancellor during the period when UK household debt doubled and house prices trebled, and amazingly enough, gullible journalists are now parroting my bare-faced lie that I have been putting forward proposals to deal with this for years."

Meanwhile, Mr Brown was today due to reveal that the welfare system would be subject to further tinkering during the downturn to maintain the illusion that the government had some sort of plan. He will say "It is no time to cease tinkering, thus maintaining the illusion that we have some sort of plan"

The original article is not online, so I've scanned it in for you here in case you don't believe me: