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  from the mail today.
  
  The maelstrom in the financial markets and the chilling prospect of a double-dip recession present the greatest leadership challenge yet for David Cameron and his Chancellor George Osborne.
  How the pair choose to respond will either make or break their Government. If they show mental strength and manage to navigate Britain through this storm, they will be credited with having saved the country from a moment of maximum danger.
  However, if they fail they will go down in history as men who started promisingly by trying to reduce the national deficit but who were proved to be lightweights unable to see the job through.
  
  Of course, the financial crisis that has enveloped the world over the past week was never in the script that Cameron and Osborne had prepared when they took office.
  They had hoped that Britain would now be well on the way to full economic recovery, rather than bumping along the bottom with dismal growth (only 0.2 per cent in the second quarter of this year).
  Cameron and Osborne's assumption had been that their austerity programme, designed to get our finances back in order, would mean a tough couple of years but then a period of healthy growth.
  The Tories would then be rewarded by voters giving them an outright victory in the general election in 2015.
  Indeed, Osborne bragged to close colleagues just a few months ago that the next election was already virtually 'in the bag' thanks to the deficiencies of Ed Miliband and a weak Labour opposition.
  
  
  It is because of this that the Chancellor has been advocating that the Government takes a less rigorous economic policy than some people have been calling for in order to avoid jeopardising the Tories' electoral chances.

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