The concerted rescue effort launched by the world's central banks yesterday was, in two ways, an admission of failure by the stewards of the global financial system. First, it was an acknowledgement that the problems threatening economic growth next year will not be resolved by using the central banker's favoured lever, interest rates. The problem in the banking world has not been the cost of borrowing, but the shortage of funds. This has not been a traditional credit crunch, but a liquidity crisis. The second admission is that central banks, even those as mighty as the US Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank and the Bank of England, cannot resolve the problems in a globalised financial system on their own. Financial instability is a global, not a national, condition. Any remedy must be taken together. Like waves of cavalry entering the battlefield late but still hoping to carry the day, the world's leading central banks have unveiled a joint plan to pump an unprecedented level of financial support into the short-term funding markets. The provision of extra funds is welcome.

But these measures have an ad hoc quality to them. The principal central banks have had to devise this strategy through a series of informal exchanges over a number of months in large part because the formal mechanisms that might have made for an earlier and more elegant execution of policy do not exist at present.

This is part of a much broader challenge to the governance of the world: the inadequacy of old institutions to deal with new realities. The architecture of international economic institutions was created at the closing of the Second World War and has not been reformed on anything like the requisite scale in the decades since.

This, the Prime Minister asserts in his interview with The Times today, will be the message that he takes to the EU summit in Brussels tomorrow (once the political caravan has completed its surreal journey there from Lisbon).

Europe has spent an inordinate amount of time over the past two decades engaged in the introspective micromanagement of its institutions while being oblivious of the need to focus on the bodies that underpin the world economy of which it is a part. It has become detached from reality. This is the equivalent of endlessly fussing about the design of the garden shed while the primary household property itself is showing every indication of subsidence. This is not economic integration, but isolationism.

Mr Brown makes an intelligent and much needed case for a new international architecture and he is right to put Britain at the forefront of a determined effort to implement substantial change. None of this, though, absolves Mr Brown of an EU “reform” treaty that will do nothing for the competitiveness of this continent; nor negate the impression of confusion, bordering on slapstick, that arriving in Portugal today after the signing ceremony itself will inevitably engender. One of his main arguments in favour of ratifying a document with which he appears to enjoy a semi-detached relationship is that it is essential for Britain's relationship with, and influence on, France and Germany. That assertion would cut far more mustard if Downing Street were engaged with Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel consistently and effectively.

The sense in Paris and Berlin is that London's interest in them is spasmodic. Mr Brown is unlikely to achieve the reform that he wants unless he lavishes time and energy on his allies.