The Sketch: I'm not on drugs, but I can see Osborne as Chancellor

George Osborne launched the second day of Budget debate. Gordon wasn't there. He was negotiating peace in Northern Ireland. An odd thing for a chancellor to be doing, you might think.

Regular readers will assume I'm on mescaline, but I've suddenly been able to imagine George Osborne as Chancellor of the Exchequer. I saw a news clip of Gordon Brown from 1994. He looked like Just William. If office dignifies everyone like that, and Ozzie has a born-to-rule quality which he is managing more and more to keep out of public view, they might just do it.

I can't help thinking the Budget statement was a disaster for Brown. It dramatised everything that people don't like about him. Boring and unintelligible. But it was boring and unintelligible with a purpose: it was boring and unintelligible to confuse everyone so they'd have to believe Gordon's interpretation of it. Which will change.

For instance, he still rejects righteously Osborne's third fiscal rule. He gets others in his party to join in. One bench-monkey jumped up yesterday hooting that Tories "have been going around the country saying they will cut £21bn from public services". But this third rule, is explicitly the main strategic thrust of the Budget.

Osborne - quite relaxed, incidentally - made as much of it as he could, with a snappy soundbite: "The Chancellor has dropped the growth rate of spending below the rate of trend growth in the economy!" It needs a little work, I agree.

"He has done what he's spent a year saying couldn't be done!" The Chancellor is "sharing the proceeds of growth". They will say this more and more, I hope, with gusto. Brown will crack first, I guarantee.

Because there is much more mileage in this, Gordon had concluded his statement with the words "to make the tax system fairer, I will cut the basic rate of income tax from 22p to 20p". To make the system fairer? Tax cuts make the system fairer. Do they?

That doesn't shoot the Tory fox. Because he doesn't mean it. And none of his colleagues believes it. Not one of them. They all believe the dead, diametric opposite. If they have to campaign on the fact that lower taxes are fairer, they will be caught in the other little-remarked fact from the Budget.

People earning up to £24,500 don't pay income tax. Everything that is taken from them is given back again in benefits and credits. But it takes an army of paper shufflers to do it. And no one understands it because "the rate at which tax credits are reduced as earnings rise has also gone up", as one think-tank brainbox said. I defy anyone to understand that quote at first reading. Brown's anti-poverty policy is literally unintelligible to ordinary people.

Chancellors can get away with that, but I don't think prime ministers can.

sketch@simoncarr.co.uk

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