Why we can’t afford a third term

The reputation of Gordon Brown has never stood higher than it does this election weekend. The Chancellor has pulled off a double which has eluded virtually every chancellor in history: he is hailed simultaneously as a political genius and as an outstanding manager of the British economy.

Politically, this reputation is well enough justified. The general election has granted Gordon Brown the prize he has sought for almost two decades. He is now the universally accepted Labour leader-in-waiting. Tony Blair has publicly pledged his endorsement, but only because he had no choice. The Chancellor is a far more powerful and trusted figure than the Prime Minister, both inside the Labour party and in the country at large. Gordon Brown has become the crutch of a widely despised Prime Minister.

Economically, it looks at first sight the same story. At the start of the election campaign Tony Blair hailed his Chancellor as the finest for 100 years. In a speech on Monday, the Chancellor audaciously laid claim to be the inheritor of Margaret Thatcher’s legacy of prudent economic housekeeping.

It may seem churlish to take issue with the great claims made by and for Gordon Brown. But 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. His achievements over the past eight years have been greatly exaggerated, and the future looks full of menace. Gordon Brown is characteristically New Labour: he has brilliantly constructed his own reputation by playing fast and loose with the facts while gradually draining the British economy of its dynamism with a flood of red tape and tax hikes.

The Treasury sometimes seems to have modelled itself on the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: the past has been erased, history rewritten to ensure that 1997 has become the year zero and the Tory years portrayed as a dark age of recession, inflation, unemployment and poverty.