BRITISH PRIME minister Gordon Brown appeared to play down expectations of next week’s G20 summit yesterday, while denying reports of a rift with Bank of England governor Mervyn King.

Speaking in New York on the latest leg of a three-continent tour to establish “consensus” ahead of next week’s summit in London, Mr Brown claimed Mr King’s support for action to restore economic growth.

Many politicians and analysts had already concluded, however, that Mr King’s intervention on Monday was a signal of support for those in the Treasury resisting pressure for another “fiscal stimulus” for the UK economy in chancellor Alistair Darling’s budget statement on April 22nd.

“Bank to Brown: stop spending” and “The Bank and No 10 at War” were among the headline reactions to Mr King’s warning that the prospect of “very large fiscal deficits” over the next two or three years meant the British government could not afford “another significant round of fiscal expansion”.

The International Monetary Fund says Britain’s budget deficit will reach 11 per cent of GDP in 2010.

In Europe, on Monday, Mr Brown’s ambitions for the G20 appeared undiminished when he urged other countries to deliver “the biggest financial stimulus the world has ever seen”. In America yesterday, however, he said leaders were agreed on the need to look at the impact of actions already taken and on the question of “what should happen next”.

Stressing that countries would operate to their own timetables for action, Mr Brown said: “Nobody is suggesting that people go to the G20 meeting and put on the table the budget they are going to have for the next year . . . Every country will have its own timing for making its fiscal and monetary decisions.

“Nobody is trying to upset that timing, which is a matter for individual governments reporting to their individual parliaments. But I think there is a determination that you will find in the European communique and in what president Obama said [on Tuesday] to do whatever it takes to restore the economy to growth.”

Conservative shadow business secretary Kenneth Clarke described Mr Brown’s performance on the international stage as “somewhat incredible” and predicted that, as one of the architects of the “casino capitalism” that led to the current crisis, Mr Brown was likely to receive a cool response to his calls for further economic stimulus.

“All this stuff about fiscal stimulus, I think, will get a raspberry at the G20 and rightly so,” he told the BBC News channel: “For him to go around saying ‘Can I be allowed to borrow and spend some more – that is the way out of our difficulties’, I think is somewhat incredible.”