The Daily Telegraph’s Bruno Waterfield has more on suggestions that the UK might apply to join the euro and the humiliation (both for Gordon Brown and the country he ‘leads’) that this already implies:

As Britain’s economy has dived from new low to low, Mr Brown has gone to great lengths to cultivate Mr Barroso [the EU’s top bureaucrat] and the French President Nicolas Sarkozy. That has been the conversation that has taken place and Britain has been a supplicant in the process.
As noted over on Certain Ideas of Europe, there is a irony in the new reality that Britain, now economic Europe’s basket case, would struggle to get into the euro – even the British people voted for it.
Soaring public debt, the Commission called it a “spiral” last month and a plummeting currency that is daily devalued by international money markets on the basis that a Pound based on a non-value creating housing market and financial sector is really worth that much.
Mr Brown ruled out British membership of the euro in 2003 after the Treasury concluded joining was not in the UK’s economic interest. It seems that the case is altered.
“Fluctuating exchange rates with major trading partners within the EU can exacerbate uncertainty and increase difficulties caused by the economic crisis,” is the analysis here.
Perhaps the euro zone, which hands over so much responsibility to unelected bankers in Frankfurt, seems more appealing when Britain’s economic chickens come home to roost.
It may well be that the EU, with the hyperactive President Sarkozy and a new global initiative every week, becomes a comfort zone and reassuring displacement activity for politicians who are evading the tough questions a recession poses.
There are lots of questions as Britain plunges into the slump over the next few months. The euro is not the answer and if the Government has been yearning for membership it is another ominous indicator of the mindset in Downing Street.