No matter how much we love them, most women will agree that husbands can be very hard work. But imagine being married to Gordon Brown. That certainly puts the challenge posed by the average man into perspective.

But I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling uncomfortable at her taking to the stage during last week's Labour conference, as the banking crisis lurched deeper, job losses mounted and mortgage bills took off again.

She is not an elected representative, was in no way responsible for the current crisis and has no power whatsoever to put it right.

Why didn't a senior member of the Labour Party introduce their leader? Because the rest of them are up to their eyes in this mess, of course.

It all reminded me of the film Meet The Fockers: the beautiful, long-suffering young wife permanently apologising for her accident-prone husband, who is constantly causing chaos and antagonising the family who adore her.

Can you guess who plays the role of the idiot son-in-law responsible for all hell breaking loose in Labour's remake of Meet The Fockers? Oh yes, we heard much huffing and puffing about wicked bankers and greedy consumers last week.

But it was our former Chancellor who presided over an unprecedented and unsustainable boom in house prices and credit. In 1997 he took interest rate setting decisions away from politicians and put them into the hands of the Bank of England.

Previous attempts to control inflation had kept the Retail Prices Index under close scrutiny. But Brown specifically instructed the Bank to shadow RPIX, which contained no element of the cost of house buying.

Historically, runaway house price inflation was choked off by interest rate hikes, but that was no longer the way things would work.

So why should anyone be surprised that there followed a cycle of double-digit annual house price inflation, the dangerous consequences of which were simply ignored? Prices rose by more than 10% across the UK for the following six out of eight years.

It's no good blaming consumers. They had no choice but to take on a mountain of debt if they were to get a roof over their heads. And while not wishing to exonerate the bankers, they did not create this hunger for credit but merely devised ever more imaginative ways to meet it.

And now we must all live with the consequences. The cost of a £100,000 mortgage has risen again by up to £500 a year after the Abbey, HSBC, Woolwich, First Direct, Skipton and Yorkshire hiked rates by typically between 0.3% and 0.5%.

The cheapest deals now require massive arrangement fees, such as Halifax's 4.89% with a 2.5% fee (giving a first-year rate of 7.39%), or First Direct's 5.19% with a £1,998 fee.

Banks have continued to shed staff, with redundancies announced at HSBC and Bradford & Bingley, and many other businesses contracting.

House price falls look unstoppable, although Scotland is performing better than elsewhere. Figures due tomorrow from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors show sellers are having to accept 12.5% less than they are asking for their homes across the UK. So far, north of the border prices are only 2.5% below expectations.

It'd take a formidable wife to make amends for that lot. But what a bunch of cowards the rest of them are.

Central to the Focker family is the circle of trust. I'd say our circle is well and truly broken.

A mortgage mess
IT BROUGHT home the importance of checking your mortgage statement when, after my recent move, the very first month's account was bungled.

Our mortgage lender, First Direct, charged us not just our mortgage repayment but someone else's too. The wrongly deducted amount was for more than £1,000, and as it is an offset mortgage it would have cost us dear had it not been spotted. Just to prove I always practise what I preach (not), the bank noticed before we did, notified us and put the matter right.

And now watchdogs have fined GE Money £1.12m after screwing up 600 customers' mortgage accounts to the tune of £2.3m.

Be warned.

School runs on foot
I'VE decided to include a silver-lining item each week, because I can't stand all this relentless bad news. Please feel free to contribute.

To kick off, high petrol prices have sounded a death knell for school runs, with eight out of 10 children now walking, according to uSwitch. That has to be good news.