It was bitter, brutal politics: a Budget that launched the election

In the last month Gordon Brown has made two personal gestures to David Cameron. The first was to send flowers to congratulate the Conservative leader on the birth of his son, and the second was to fashion his Budget into a no less direct political message saying, ‘I will destroy you.’ His speech on Wednesday was not about the shape of the British economy, but the shape of the weapon Labour requires to fight the Conservatives. This much was inevitable; what is striking are the tactics which Cameron has developed in counter-attack.

His most biting remarks came not in his Budget response, but in an interview last month. ‘With Blair at Question Time, there is a sort of jokiness between us,’ he told the Sunday Times magazine. ‘But with Brown it is literally, “You are evil, you are dead, I will kill you, I will stamp you into the ground until my boot is banging up and down on your face.”’