House of Commons gaffe

Gordon Brown's slip of the tongue during PM questions, in which he said his government had 'saved the world', is reminiscent of a similar gaffe another British minister had made during the seven years of the junta's reign.

More specifically, the time was June 1973 and, while debating the British recognition of the Papadopoulos republican government, foreign secretary Sir Alec Douglas-Home responded to a relevant question by James Callaghan.
Douglas-Home later in the same session asked to correct his slip of the tongue as he had picked up a phrase of Callaghan referring to the Colonels:

'I think I said he rightly called it "the illegal regime in Greece"'.

The statement was caught by opposition circles in London, with the European-Atlantic Action Committee on Greece publishing a rather mordant bulletin to comment on Whitehall's policy towards the Colonels:

'The indecent haste with which the British government recognised the newly declared Greek Republic on 13th June was a gratuitous favour to Papadopoulos and was rightly the subject of critical questioning in the House of Commons by the Opposition's Shadow Foreign Secretary. That the government felt some embarrasment over the decision was indicated by a revealing 'slip of tongue' made by Sir Alec Douglas-Home in referring to the Greek regime as "illegal"'.