If it is not one thing for Prime Minister Gordon Brown, it’s another. Following hard on his stony reception by the TUC, his public dalliance with Margaret Thatcher put him in deep trouble with all trade unionists and anyone else who remembers the damage done by her fetishist free-market government.

Mr Brown will not profit by his public association with the Friedmanite disciple, especially since conviction is growing that his own economic analysis is that way inclined.

And the Northern Rock crisis won’t help his case with the voters, since nothing illustrates the grotesqueries of the free market better than this appalling housing cock-up.

Faced with soaring house prices and rising mortgage interest rates, the last thing that Mr Brown needed was a public display of the speculations and reckless gambles that fund private housing provision.

The role of the mortgage lender is, in theory at least, a simple one.

People save money with it and it pays them a rate of interest on their savings.

Those savings are lent out to mortgage borrowers at a higher rate of interest, which covers the company’s costs, its profit line and the interest paid to the savers.

Which, given that mortgage lenders generally pay at least twice the cost of their houses in repayments, should satisfy the most ardent of capitalists.

But, unfortunately, that just isn’t the full story. Inject into the mix a new Labour government that has actively curtailed the role of local authorities in providing social housing and encouraged free-market speculation to such a degree that private house prices have effectively trebled over its period of tenure.

Then add a company hungry for growth and profits which pays its chief executive £1.36 million a year and looks for profits around the half-billion level and what do you get?

You get a company that borrows on the money markets to lend. You get a company that, with only £24 billion of savings assets on its books, lends out over £100 billion and buys cheap and insecure US sub-prime debt in the hope of turning a swift buck, borrowing from whoever it can to do so.

And, therefore, you get a company which grows to fifth biggest lender in Britain on the back of borrowed capital.

So, if anything goes wrong with the US market – as it has – this company is vulnerable.

The banks are more reluctant to lend cash and are tightening the purse strings.

And Britain’s fifth biggest lender becomes Britain’s biggest problem.

Some advert for the free market.

It gets complex when you look at the figures, because that £100 billion-plus, as soon as it is loaned out, shows up as an asset, making the company look, at least to the uninitiated, healthy and secure.

But, such is the nature of the free market that those assets are only only worth what the big banks think that they are worth and, should their confidence go, it’s up to – Yes, you’ve guessed it – poor old Joe Public and the nation’s assets to bale them out via the government and the Bank of England.

So much for the “freedom” of the free market that Mr Brown sets so much store by.

But what an argument for public-sector rented housing the private sector vultures have gifted to us, if we only had a Labour government with the guts to use it and to start killing off the predators of the private sector.