R.I.P.

Gordon Brown made a decent resignation speech and people are nice to the departing loser, but before long conversation will turn again to whether he was the worst Prime Minister we have ever had.

I am inclined to think he wasn’t, firstly because competition for that accolade is pretty stiff, and second because his premiership was defined by trying to patch up, undo and explain the mistakes of the previous Chancellor of the Exchequer which was, of course, him.

I think, however, he is well on course to be regarded as the worst Chancellor we have ever had.

In part it was the preachy hypocrisy. While pompously lecturing his European counterparts (there is one group of people who won’t miss him) on management of the economy, he unleashed a debt fuelled boom that has left us on our knees. While preaching about the ‘twenty-two Tory tax rises’ he introduced literally hundreds, introducing us to the term ‘stealth tax’ which meant something he had inserted into the small print which you only discovered several days after the end of the debate. While rambling on about Prudence being his watchword he allowed the economy to overheat, such that the only way he could stop the Monetary Policy Committee from raising interest rates was to change the definition of inflation, which he didn’t hesitate to do.

Brown wrecked the nation’s pensions, taking out, some say, £100 billion, leaving the stockmarket (into which the pensions were invested) roughly at the same level it was in 1997. He did this by cancelling the Advanced Corporation Tax dividend relief, confident that the voters wouldn’t understand it and therefore wouldn’t complain. With this and his tax rises and his debt he showered the public sector with money, most of which went on pay rises for people who might vote for him.

As a politician Brown was perhaps the most tribalist we have ever seen. Anyone who can profess to being a socialist while taking away the 10p tax rate, making our poorest people worse off, just to score a point off the Tories, is a psychological study.

With Brown goes the last vestige of New Labour. With its Spin Doctors and Special Advisers, its media refutation unit (what the minister was actually saying....) its corruption, its dirty tricks, it has brought British Politics to a new low from which I don’t expect we shall ever recover. On average, in their thirteen years of office, a new crime was created every day.

Good riddance to the whole twisted, sanctimonious lot of them.