Gordon Brown’s Missing ‘I’?

I suspect that the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has been widely misquoted in the media reports of last night’s leaders’ debate on the BBC. According to the reports I’ve read, he said:

But I do know how to run the economy, in good times and in bad.

Surely what he really said — or at least meant to say — was the following:

But I do know how to ruin the economy, in good times and in bad.

After all, he couldn’t possibly have meant what he is quoted to have said. Britain isn’t Soviet Russia. It’s not the job of the Prime Minister — or anyone else for that matter — to “run the economy”. We don’t need someone to “run the economy” any more than we need someone to “run the media” or “run the Internet”. But thanks to Soviet Russia and other disastrous experiments in ideological socialism, we do know that governments who think they can run a country’s economy will inevitably ruin that country’s economy.

No, all the evidence suggests that the Prime Minister is missing an ‘i’.