Gordon Brown’s career as Prime Minister has got off to a flying start. For this, he can partly thank al-Qaeda, since last week’s attempted bombings created the best of both worlds for any incumbent as No 10: a surge of patriotism and respect for authority, combined with relief and admiration for the emergency services, because nobody was actually hurt.

But even without the failed doctors’ plot, the surge of support for Labour in the polls was pretty much inevitable and expected, as was the outbreak of infighting among the Tories when they discovered to their horror that Mr Brown was not changing his name by deed poll to Joseph Stalin the moment he came to power. Then yesterday came the first genuine surprise.

Mr Brown did something I have long suspected he might do, but never fully believed: he started to outflank David Cameron from the Right and to reposition Labour as Britain’s most solidly pro-business party. Mr Brown’s reasons for trying to do this are quite simple: he has always believed that the steady growth of the British economy in the past ten years has been his greatest achievement as Chancellor.

Maintaining this growth is now the indispensable condition for his success as Prime Minister, and justified the sacrifice of impractical socialist precepts he once believed. Outflanking Mr Cameron on economic policy would also be politically attractive, because it would cut the Tories off from their natural electoral heartland. But while the logic of a shift towards pro-business policies under Mr Brown was always quite compelling, almost nobody believed it would happen, and even I had my doubts.

Partly this was a matter of style. Mr Brown has always been very unpopular in the City of London and the business community and his elevation to Prime Minister has been a big source of worry to British businessmen and financiers.

Even though they could never quite put their finger on what they were worried about, the visceral distrust of Mr Brown was impossible to disregard. In the past few days, however, this attitude has been noticeably changing.

The flanking operation began with Mr Brown’s decision to appoint Sir Digby Jones, the outspoken former Director-General of the CBI, as a minister without forcing him to join the Labour Party, and invite Damon Ruffini, Britain’s most prominent private equity boss, to join the new Business Council. The pincer movement continued on Tuesday when John Hutton, the new Secretary of State for Business, accused Tories of “downplaying the importance of business” and added that Labour “wants to be the natural party of business”. But these were just preludes to the real thrust of the new strategy, revealed by Alistair Darling in yesterday’s Financial Times.

In this interview, the new Chancellor ruled out any rush to impose new taxes or regulations on private equity and hedge funds, as demanded by a strange alliance between the trade union movement and populist tabloids.

Much more importantly, he hinted as clearly as a Chancellor ever can that foreign financiers living in Britain would continue indefinitely to enjoy their present very favourable treatment under the nondomiciled tax regime. And he justified this favourable treatment with the most pragmatic, and hence most persuasive, reasons: “I am very well aware that people who do business, and who contribute to business here, can go elsewhere.”

More generally, Mr Darling repeatedly emphasised the importance of the City and of liberal financial markets as “absolutely critical” to the prosperity of the whole British economy, adding for good measure that Britain’s increasing specialisation in finance was something to be welcomed, not opposed.

He showed his intense awareness of just how important it is to maintain a pro-business environment by contrasting Labour’s approach with the damaging overregulation of financial markets by American politicians after the dot-com crash.

Even more importantly, Mr Darling launched a veritable diatribe against Nicolas Sarkozy and his efforts to push EU economic policies in a more protectionist and less pro-market direction. As the new Chancellor put it: “There is an ideological battle at the moment in Europe” and there could be no doubt which side Britain would be on: “I do not believe in economic nationalism. Economic nationalism is protectionism and there is no other word for it. I think it is nonsense.” You can’t be much clearer than that – and there can be little doubt that these words of Mr Darling’s were carefully chosen and endorsed by Mr Brown.

The minimal implication of these comments is that economic policy under the Darling-Brown regime will definitely not push Britain in the direction of more protectionism, higher marginal taxes, tighter regulation or generalised attacks against the City, the business community or “the rich”, however defined. A slightly more ambitious interpretation would hold that Mr Brown will actually give Messrs Darling and Hutton more latitude to deregulate and to move the tax system in a pro-competitive direction than he himself enjoyed under Tony Blair. An even more speculative, but nonetheless quite plausible, interpretation, is that economic and foreign policy could become more mutually reinforcing under the new Government.

Is it possible, for example, that Mr Brown might use a row with France over protectionism and competition as a reason to withdraw his support for the new EU treaty? I have no idea, but it does seem clear from Mr Darling’s provocative comments on President Sarkozy that the new Government does not necessarily feel bound by the late-night deals that were made in Brussels last month by Mr Blair.

It is therefore quite conceivable that, in the forthcoming negotiations on the new European treaty, Mr Brown could try to reinsert the objective of “free and undistorted competition” that Mr Sarkozy removed in his now notorious coup. He could then call for a referendum in Britain if France rejected this demand on the reasonable ground that a treaty that played down the single market would be fundamentally changing the nature of the EU. Such a toughening of Britain’s negotiating stance would be hugely popular, both with the British public and the business community.

None of this would, of course, guarantee Mr Brown’s success as Prime Minister, since the biggest political issues in Britain – Iraq, violent crime, education – have little to do with economics, or Europe. Still, to judge by his first week in government, Mr Brown really is off to a good start.

Times Recommends

• Britain doesn’t need a dose of shock therapy
• Why the sea eagle has no right to land here
• Let older women have a voice at the BBC