Outfoxing Brown

Brown’s breathtakingly bad performance on Marr risks overlooking Liam Fox’s brilliant one. As Andrew Porter has said, word perfect. We see too little of Fox for my liking. Like David Davis, he has an instinctive grasp of low-tax economics and has a wonderful emperor’s-got-no-clothes contempt for Brown’s economic record. “Labour are still caught in this mental rut that Gordon Brown was a great Chancellor, they’ve got economic stability, and if they say it often enough people will believe it,” he said. Quite so.

As Allister Heath wrote in The Spectator three years ago, “It seems likely that in due course Brown will be marked down not as one of the greatest but instead as one of the most destructive chancellors in British history.” The Tories badly need to hammer home this narrative – what I have called the “reign of error”. It’s happening to Greenspan in America already. Osborne is doing a fine job, but we need all the Shadow Cabinet rubbishing Brown’s record every chance they get, with the effortless and fluency which Fox managed today.