Dave Cameron is no Margaret Thatcher, but Gordon Brown is very much a friend to gold...

SOCIALIST GOLD-OWNERS are rarer than Tory foxes. But should British gold investors, one month from now, vote against the man who ignored the Bank of England's best advice - and sold over half of the UK's gold reserves at the very lowest prices a decade ago?

Voting against Gordon Brown would seem to go against the gold investor's best interests. Because "Dear Prudence" has also presided over the greatest credit bubble and bust since the South Sea Company, flooding the world with both Sterling and gilts, while making record-low interest rates a key plank of policy.

Cheers, Gordon!

Real rates of bank interest, after inflation, have now averaged zero since June 2007 - just before the crisis that Brown's grace-and-favouritism created blew up at home.

Unsurprisingly, the price of gold has more than doubled over that time - and fully 25% of that gain has come thanks to Sterling's drop on the currency market. So backing more of the same might seem sound tactics for the floating voter blessed with a position in gold.

Private gold owners might want to think twice, however, before endorsing Labour's next five-year attack on the constitution and civil liberties. Because gold may well prove necessary, even with a Conservative government.

Last time we got "the most important election for a generation", the price of gold in Sterling didn't peak for eight months after the Tory victory of May 1979. On its monthly average, the price of gold for British investors didn't peak until Feb. '83 - almost four years after Margaret Thatcher took power.

And let's face it, David Cameron is no Margaret Thatcher.

It took bank-deposit rates approaching 15% to rescue the Pound after the last Labour administration was thrown out. But that was only after a decade and more of destructive inflation had made tight money politically possible.

Near-double digits on the real - not nominal - return-to-cash were needed to make gold redundant as an inflation hedge. Whereas today, and for the foreseeable future, sound money remains quite literally unthinkable, whoever wins No.10 in May.