Gordon Brown sought to don the mantle of Churchill and Roosevelt yesterday as he called for world leaders to gather for a new Bretton Woods, the conference held in 1944 to draw up a postwar financial order.

“First Britain, then Europe, now the world,” a Conservative frontbencher said, reflecting on Mr Brown’s new-found confidence as he tackled the financial crisis, making a plethora of speeches, press conference appearances and trips on the international stage.

Only an hour after outlining his plan for a £37 billion public injection to rescue three British banks, Mr Brown turned his attention to reforming the world’s financial system.

He told a City audience that there had to be “a new financial architecture for the years ahead”, with global supervision to match a world where money flowed across borders and firms operated multinationally.

Mr Brown, speaking at Reuters in Canary Wharf, said that he had sought to bring in such changes since 1998, but there had always been something more pressing for other countries to worry about. He added: “Sometimes it does take a crisis for people to agree that what is obvious and should have been done years ago can no longer be postponed.”

World leaders must now show the same “courage and foresight” in reforming the international financial system as Roosevelt and Churchill did more than 60 years ago, he said. In the heat of battle, the wartime US President and the British leader were “taking steps to forge the reconstruction and peace that was to come”.

Mr Brown’s resurgence and Labour claims of credit for the rescue are clearly unsettling the Conservatives. “This is no triumph,” George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, said. “It is a desperate last-ditch attempt to prevent catastrophe.”

In the Commons, Alistair Darling quipped that Mr Osborne was clearly finding it hard to stick with the biparti-san approach that he had promised at the Conservative Party conference.

The Prime Minister intends to make the most of the moment. He was delighted to be invited by President Sarkozy of France to attend the meeting of the eurozone countries in Paris on Sunday, and even happier when most of them suggested that they were adopting solutions similar to those taken by Britain.

Until now, the euro has been an exclusive club, with Britain on the outside. As Chancellor, Mr Brown fought hard to keep sterling out of the single currency. But here he was being welcomed because of his experience as a finance minister and because others wanted to hear about his plan.

Tomorrow he intends to go to the midterm European Council summit in Brussels early – almost unheard of for recent British prime ministers – to hold one-to-one meetings with fellow heads and to attend a meeting of European socialist group leaders.

As the crisis has grown, Mr Brown has been in his element. It has rescued his leadership at a time when he was under serious threat. He has been seen smiling and even cracked a joke the other night about banks going under. The Tories will go for him if he appears to be enjoying it too much.

David Cameron is trying to lay some of the blame for the crisis at Mr Brown’s door, reminding the voters that he was Chancellor during Britain’s “decade of debt”. The Tory leader pointed out that, in the end, there would be a hefty bill for the rescue – with the Government having committed itself to borrowing of £11,000 for every household in the country.

Mr Brown will go on preaching the need for international cooperation. He said yesterday international financial systems were now so interlinked that the problems could not be resolved by any nation acting alone. “The global financial system is too clouded with opacity, conflicts of interest, irresponsible risk-taking,” he said.

“A focus on short-term rewards created risks for us all as money was lent that had almost no chance of being repaid and was then repackaged and sold on. In the end, financial engineering will not work if people cannot see or do not understand the nature of the assets and the risks they are taking on.”

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