The Sketch: I've seen a disaster up close, it's Gordon's speech notes

Looking down on the Chancellor (and that's easier than it sounds from where we sit) you get a good view into the boiling disturbance that constitutes his brain. His notes. We can see his speech notes. They look like the correspondence of some troubled reader warning the public about the fluoride that aliens are using to control the world government's plan to introduce symmetrical inflation targets for monkeys.

The typed words are more or less entirely crossed out with thick, black marker pen. Arrows bisect the page making wild connections between paragraphs. When his opponents speak, he scribbles furiously, as if to catch the numberless rebuttals that are occurring to him continuously. He may well be writing out the words to "I've Got A Lovely Bunch of Coconuts". He seems to think this Brownian motion unsettles the Opposition. When Oliver Letwin intervenes, he opens up his folder and riffles insanely through the pages.

As theatre, it is absurd, and, therefore, funny but as performance art it is pretty cheap. Is this how potential prime ministers behave? Can we really imagine Gordon Brown as Prime Minister? It certainly makes you think the Tories could win an election if he were.

Now, in so far as the world is described through statistics we get a very imperfect picture of it. The statistical apparatus of the Government has been so thoroughly debauched (largely by Gordon Brown himself) that it's hard to know what to believe.

Has a 37 per cent increase in health spending really only produced a 5 per cent rise in health outputs? If so, it lends credence to Mr Letwin's claim of a "colossal structural mistake" on the Government's part. But is the point rebutted by Mr Brown's list of more cataract operations, more scans, more statins and more trips in the ambulance? Or is that, in turn, refuted by Mr Letwin's cunning analysis comparing the reduction in waiting times with the increase in operations? (They don't match.)"How do you get so many people off waiting lists without many more operations?" he asked. Is it because patients have gone private? Or is it because the waiting lists have been fiddled? You may not know much about statistics but you'll know what you like.

Again and again Mr Brown told us that the Letwin "plan" to reduce public spending to 35 per cent of GDP would mean cuts of £80bn. That is, he said, to take away the entire funding of the NHS. He forgot to mention the other Tory plan to introduce compulsory clog dancing in Lancashire and to legalise the hunting with dogs of working-class children under the age of eight.

The Conservative idea is that lower tax prompts faster economic growth.

Thus, as the tax rate declines, the tax take declines more slowly. The difference is made good by savings on government waste. It's how you can, in theory, reduce taxation without cutting public services. Well, it's certainly working in America.

It would surely raise the reputation of democracy if the Chancellor were to argue this case instead of crouching on the front bench tearing hungrily at his fingernails with his teeth.

simoncarr75@hotmail.com