William Hague, the Tory foreign affairs spokesman, is rightly concerned about the shipment of Chinese arms which is trying to find its way to Zimbabwe’s president Robert Mugabe, but his grasp of African geography is less certain.

On Tuesday he issued a press release calling on David Miliband, foreign secretary “to take urgent action with regard to the Chinese ship, currently heading to Uganda carrying arms bound for Zimbabwe”.

Hague’s intervention sent the Foreign Office into a spin, as officials pored over atlases trying to work out how the Chinese vessel might achieve the unlikely task of offloading its weapons in a land-locked country in the heart of Africa.

Perhaps he envisaged the ship heading up to the Mediterranean, taking a right turn down the River Nile and then making the tortuous journey through sub-Saharan Africa to Lake Victoria. Not sure whether the river is up to taking ocean-going ships though.

“What is he talking about?” asked one government official. So far there has been no explanation from Mr Hague’s team about this strange Ugandan affair.

These are dangerous times for the government. Alistair Darling, chancellor, is in serious political trouble and the sound of muttering about his performance can be heard swelling around Whitehall.

Gordon Brown’s spokesman on Tuesday repeated the view that it was "total garbage" that the prime minister had any doubts about the performance of his neighbour.

But there are some senior figures close to Mr Brown who are questioning how Mr Darling managed to spectacularly damage the government’s relations with business with last year’s pre-budget report.

When this sort of criticism seeps into the political gossip machine, it can be unsettling. When it relates to the way in which the Brown camp sees the Chancellor of the Exchequer it threatens to be highly damaging to the government. Ben Brogan in his Daily Mail blog points out what is at stake.

The fact is that Mr Darling’s pre-budget report - with its capital gains tax reforms and plans to hit non-doms with a £30,000 levy - was hastily drawn up with an autumn general election in mind.

It might have played well in a three week election campaign, but it has gone down disastrously with business and the City. This is the very constituency which Mr Brown - through ten years as chancellor - struggled so hard to win over.

But if the detail in the PBR was Mr Darling’s responsibility, the plan to tax rich foreigners and hit private equity bosses through CGT reform was Mr Brown’s. It was the PM who toyed with the early election; it was Mr Brown who told his chancellor to rush out these plans to counter Tory moves in the same area.

They are in this together. My guess is that Mr Brown will not move his chancellor in a summer reshuffle - a move which would smack of sheer panic - and that Mr Darling will continue to play a role as a human shield deflecting criticism from Number 10.

Ed Balls, children’s minister, is talked about as a chancellor-in-waiting. But does Mr Brown really want his closest ally to stand in the line of fire at such a dangerous political and economic moment.

I’ve been tipping Tony Blair to be the first "president of Europe" since 2002 - when the creation of the job was just a twinkle in his eye - so I’m delighted the former PM is taking soundings about whether the post will be worthy of his political talents. No doubting his self-confidence, is there?

Back in 2002 I remember being told that Mr Blair thought the creation of a full-time president of the European Council - the supreme body of the EU - was the most important thing to get written into the new EU constitution, now rebranded the Treaty of Lisbon.

What’s more aides to the PM told me over a coffee in Strasbourg that this was a job in which he had "a keen personal interest". The story I wrote off the back of this briefing spawned a brilliant follow-up by Trevor Kavanagh of The Sun, who wrote Mr Blair would be a Napoleonic figure, living in a huge (yet to be built) presidential palace.

I always had my doubts whether a former British PM would get the job, simply because I couldn’t imagine a French president agreeing to let a Brit stride around the world stage speaking for Europe. But since Nicolas Sarkozy seems to be almost as much in love with TB as he is with Carla Bruni, that no longer seems a problem.

If Silvio Berlusconi (Mr Blair’s old holiday pal) gets back into power in Italy, consider it a done deal - if Mr Blair wants ths job.

He apparently wants to know exactly what it entails. Will it be simply to act as a messenger boy for the EU’s 27 leaders on the off-chance they can agree a common position. Or will he have real clout in areas such as trade and foreign policy?

It seems to me that the first person to hold the job (which could be created in 2009) will define the job. If it’s Tony Blair it will be a big job; if it’s Jean-Claude Juncker, the Luxembourg prime minister, I suspect it will be a smaller one.

Will Gordon Brown accept it? I can’t imagine a British PM blocking a British candidate for such a job and - in any case - I hear suggestions the two old rivals are getting along better these days.

What about Cherie? She would obviously like Tony to rake in a few more millions, but by 2009 he’ll already be well on his way to his first £10m thanks to a book deal and various banking jobs. Being president of Europe is unlikely to lower his future earnings potential.

So go for it Tony. You might finally be able to do what you signally failed to do while in Number 10 - explain to the British public what is the point of our membership of the EU. And I’ll be able to rip out that old story from my 2002 cuttings book and say that I told you so.

Five European leaders are meeting on Tuesday night in Downing St to discuss the world’s economic problems. That’s no bad thing, but how much are Mssrs Brown, Sarkozy, Prodi, Barroso and Ms Merkel really going to achieve in talks lasting no more than a few hours?

Kenneth Clarke, whom one might have expected to be sceptical about the whole thing, told Sky this morning that such events are useful, provided they can be kept informal. The former Chancellor says it is important, in an inter-connected world, to know how your counterparts in Europe are going to react to any given event.

The worst thing that can happen, he says, is for the leaders to get bogged down too much in detailed work on the communique to be presented to journalists afterwards.

Fair point, but isn’t it about time all this talk about reforming the financial system started bearing fruit. After all, Mr Brown and his colleagues have been talking for months about greater transparency, better early warning systems of contagion, clearer roles for credit rating agencies and so on.

Perhaps that will all be nailed down in greater detail at the G7 in Tokyo next month. Let’s hope so.

I suspect Tuesday’s events is more about politics. For Mr Brown it is a chance to make it look like he is engaged in Europe and setting the agenda, rather than the lonely, forlorn figure who turned up late to sign the EU treaty in Lisbon last month.

For Mr Brown, Mr Sarkozy, Ms Merkel and (the soon to be former prime minster) Romano Prodi, it is also a chance to tell domestic audiences that - hey - these economic difficulties at home are actually international in nature. We’re all in this together and we’re doing something about it.

One other thought. How many times do you think we we will be told that the problems in the global financial system started in America?

Oh dear. Just what Gordon Brown didn’t want to hear. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the new head of the IMF, suggesting that the world needs a big fiscal electric-shock to help it out of its looming economic downturn.

Mr Strauss-Kahn’s view that interest rate cuts alone won’t dig the global economy out of a hole marks a surprise shift in the IMF’s position - normally it is the biggest cheerleader for fiscal consolidation.

But it is awkward for governments like Gordon Brown’s where the room for manouevre in the fiscal area is virtually non-existent. Even in the boom years, Britain’s deficit was topping 2 per cent of GDP - this year it will be nudging up towards the EU’s 3 per cent borrowing limit.

So don’t expect Mr Brown or Alistair Darling, chancellor, to be following Mr Strauss-Kahn’s advice to loosen the pursestrings a bit. They couldn’t, even if they wanted to.

Why is Mr Strauss-Kahn’s intervention bad news politically for Mr Brown? Well, it plays straight into the hands of George Osborne, shadow chancellor, who has been telling anyone who would listen in Davos that Britain is uniquely badly placed to withstand a global downturn.

Britain, he argues, has the biggest deficit of any major European economy. Automatic stabilisers - namely higher government spending in a downturn - cannot be applied. Mr Strauss-Kahn’s advice, whether economically sensible or not, is certain to draw attention to precisely that point.

Peter Hain’s resignation was inevitable once the police were called in to look into the shambolic financing of his doomed attempt to become Labour’s deputy leader. After coming fifth in the contest (who came sixth? Can’t remember), he must be wishing he hadn’t bothered.

But the big question at Westminster this afternoon is whether Gordon Brown will use this as a chance to beef up his cabinet, which many Labour MPs believe is lacking in heavyweights: people who can take the fight to the Tories.

One option would be to bring in a promising middle-ranking minister. Liam Byrne, the able immigration minister, would be an obvious choice but he is hardly a household name. Yvette Cooper, highly trusted by Mr Brown, could be promoted from housing.

The bolder choice would be to bring back in one of the big beasts of the Blair government. There a number of contenders biting their tongues on the backbenches, waiting to be brought back into the fold.

They include Charles Clarke, David Blunkett, Alan Milburn or Stephen Byers. Most have been loyally silent (apart from Mr Clarke, who lapsed but appears to have been forgiven). Mr Byers sued for peace over the Christmas period, saying that Tony Blair was "history".

But is Mr Brown ready to bring these arch-modernisers back into the cabinet, perhaps signalling a shift back towards a more Blairite "choice" agenda?

Normally one would expect the PM to make a speedy choice on Mr Hain’s replacement. We’ll probably find out this afternoon. But don’t rule out - as an outside bet - that Mr Brown’s reputation as a ditherer may apply to his first enforced cabinet reshuffle.

Watching Gordon Brown in action today at PM’s questions, I couldn’t help thinking he was actually enjoying himself for the first time. The body language was more relaxed, the smile a little less robotic.

He seems to think this clever Goldman’s wheeze on saving the Northern Rock with a government-backed bond issue offers the government an escape route from the whole fiasco and could even end up with the taxpayer making a profit.

Better still, he is able to highlight the extraordinarily uncertain Tory response to Northern Rock. Of all the options available, Mr Brown is probably right to say that administration - the current option favoured by the Tories - is probably the worst.

But I think what really got those whitened teeth flashing was a good old fashioned row over the economy. When Ken Clarke, the former chancellor, laid into him, it was just like the good old days. Mr Brown was able to reel off the stats about the Tories presiding over 15 per cent interest rates, 3m unemployed etc etc.

This is home turf for Mr Brown. It is his comfort zone. David Laws, the Lib Dem MP and former Treasury watcher, summed it up when I bumped into him outside the chamber.

"It’s almost as if the economic downturn and stock market turmoil is what he wants," he said. "It’s where he seems to want the debate to be."

Whether the public will "cling to nurse" (alias the former Iron Chancellor) or blame him for their economic plight is perhaps the big unknowables of British politics in 2008.

Nick Clegg got through probably the most nerve-wracking two minutes of his political career intact after a low-key but thoroughly telegenic debut at prime minister’s questions.

He avoided jokes - you end up looking desparate if nobody laughs. He didn’t try to be too clever. Instead he got away two questions on the government’s response to rising energy prices and fuel poverty. On the telly he looked serious and concerned. And he left the chamber unscathed.

That is about as good as he could have expected. The main thing was he did not stumble and bumble his way through his debut, as did Ming Campbell, his predecessor. Having survived he can try to be more ambitious, aggressive and funny next time.

But I was more interested at the apparently genuine attempts at flattery of Mr Clegg by David Cameron and Gordon Brown. Mr Brown spoke about their "private meetings" and how he wanted to work with him on common projects where they agreed.

Both know they may have to turn to Mr Clegg’s Liberal Democrats if - as seems possible - the next election produces a hung parliament. While Ming Campbell was a close friend of Mr Brown, the prime minister cannot rely on the support of the more right-leaning Clegg to keep him in power.

Would the Lib Dem leader do a deal with the Tories? I doubt if his activists would let him. But that does not mean he would necessarily prop up a defeated Labour government. He could do deals on an issue-by-issue basis with the biggest party.

In any case when he utters the magic Liberal Democrat word "equidistance", I reckon he intends to put more distance between his party and Labour than would ever have been imagined by either Sir Ming or - going further back - Paddy Ashdown.

Steve Morgan, who ran Peter Hain’s deputy leadership campaign, spoke today on BBC Radio Wales of arriving half way through and discovering scenes of "absolute chaos".

This tallies. After all, Mr Hain is still trying to work out who gave money to his campaign - and how much - almost six months after he was legally obliged to do so.

His office is being coy about the scale of his under-declaration of donations to the campaign, which are required under electoral law.

Few in Westminster believe Mr Hain is guilty of anything more than chaotic organisation. But the episode is worrying, not least because he is in charge of by far the biggest budget of any Whitehall department.

Some Labour MPs are asking whether a minister who is so cavalier about accounting for his own campaign finances be expected to be taking a keen interest in rooting out wrongdoing in the massive benefits budget?

Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling have made an impressive start to 2008 - at least judged by the shambolic standards of the weeks running up to Christmas.

Mr Darling flew back to the Treasury from Edinburgh for a day to give an interview to the FT which set the tone for how he will deal with the fallout of the Northern Rock crisis. Rather than waiting for the Treasury select committee to tell him what to do, this gave the impression he was in control.

Then Gordon Brown gave a series of quietly impressive television and radio interviews. Even my schoolyard friend - who normally drops off his daughter and then bends my ear about Mr Brown’s utter uselessness - said he was impressed by the PM’s appearance on the Today programme this morning.

Fair enough. But before we get too carried away, I think the real reason why Mr Brown’s administration seems a bit more stable as we enter 2008 has nothing to do with these two heavyweights "hitting the ground running".

It is more the fact that over Christmas, the government has been closed down for several weeks. No government initiatives, no disasters either. Suddenly the Conservative lead over Labour has shrunk from ten points to five.

When will politicians learn that what the voters want most is not endless action but a bit of peace and quiet. Look at Belgium: they haven’t had a government there since June, and - as far as I could judge on my last visit - the country seems to be getting on perfectly OK without the politicians.

If I were Mr Brown I’d keep my head down for a few weeks. Let memories fade of his grim 2008 and wait for the press to get bored. We might even start focusing on inconsistencies and tensions on the Tory side as David Cameron starts to roll out his programme for government.