Gordon Brown's monuments

No member of the government is closer to Gordon Brown than Shriti Vadera.

The former banker was an adviser through his many years as chancellor and has been a minister since he became prime minister.

In a way, she's his personal investment banker - the woman who co-ordinated last year's rescue of Britain's biggest banks, the brains behind the financing of all sorts of big public sector projects that were kept off the government's books, the organiser of the cancellation of debt owed by the poorest countries.

Her loyalty to him is total and - predictably - her decision to stand down as a minister is at his request, so that she can concentrate on what he regards as the big challenge of the moment: viz, how to make the global economy more stable.

She's becoming in effect the first employee of the G20, the new group of the world's most powerful countries - including the fast growing economies of Asia and South America - that has supplanted the G7.

Her role will be to advise on the design of the new institutions that must be created to make a reality of the G20's determination to better co-ordinate the economic stewardship of individual countries.

The G20 leaders are set to agree a so-called "framework of sustainable and balanced growth". It stresses the importance of eliminating imbalances - which is code for cutting the surplus savings of the Middle East and much of Asia which have been recycled into the excessive borrowings of much of the west, notably the US and UK.

However this framework document contains little detail on possible mechanisms and institutions for actually making sure that individual countries manage their economies with more sensitivity to the impact on near and distant neighbours.

Gordon Brown would love his legacy to be monumental G20 institutions that became the first bulwark against the kind of bubble that precipitated our recent economic woes.

Little wonder then that he has asked his staunchest ally, Shriti Vadera, to help build them for him.