SO commonplace are claims that, as Chancellor, Gordon Brown 'let rip' or 'lost the plot' as an explanation of our current woes that it is easy to overlook the fact that there is very little agreement on when and how this event happened.
Look at it this way. The 'Barber Boom' of the early Seventies can be dated fairly precisely to 1972 and the resurgence of inflation in the late Eighties can be traced to Nigel Lawson's decision in 1987 to shadow the German mark.
But when did Mr Brown take a wrong turning? Take your pick: from the start, with his explicit big-government agenda; from the 2002 one-point rise in National Insurance contributions to fund a huge rise in NHS spending; from 2005, when the annual rate on the Consumer Prices Index went above rather than below the two per cent target and stayed there; only at the end, when he decided a crisis caused by debt and excessive government spending ought to be cured by...more debt and excessive government spending.
I'm not mad about any of these dates. We need to figure out what he did that was wrong and worry later about when he did it.
Interest rates, thus inflation control, were out of his hands (the indulgence of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee on this score is a separate matter) and while we can now see that he ought to have acted to curb the huge build-up in mortgage debt and consumer credit, can you imagine the furore had he tried to do in, say, 2004 or 2005?
Only so much can be expected of a politician in a democratic system.
What does that leave us? Red-tape, micro-fiddling and complex tax credits are second-order issues, and the exchange-rate was not a tool of policy throughout the Brown years. So any real major error has to be on the fiscal side, with the failure to shore up the public finances - indeed, to continue borrowing through the good times, guaranteeing an even more humungous overdraft when the bad times hit.
1) Like a circle in a spiral...
WHICH is puzzling, because along with making Labour credible on the inflation side - by outsourcing interest-rate policy to the MPC - Brown sought similarly to give the party cast-iron credentials on the fiscal side, with assorted rules, such as that borrowing was for investment only, that there would be a ceiling on the ratio of debt to gross domestic product and that the budget for current spending would balance over the economic cycle.
This last is where the real problem arose, because definitions of the economic cycle vary and deciding when the cycle began and ended remained the prerogative of the Treasury. Before too long, on the basis of power corrupting and all that, the sort of jiggery-pokery that may have been predicted did indeed take place, with in one case the Treasury deciding years after the event that a 'mini-cycle' from 1997 to 1999 had not, in fact, existed.
This type of thing allowed long-spent piles of money to be shuffled back and forth across the years to make the sums add up. At the time, I described the 'cycle' as a figment of the Treasury's imagination, a windmill of the mandarins' minds.
It is a tribute to Mr Brown's presence and persuasiveness during his Chancellorship that he was able to do this for so long without the markets throwing a fit.
2) Hanging on for a reassessment?
BY a terrible irony, the former Prime Minister has, to a large extent, ended up as the one thing he was determined never to be: a discredited figure. All those rules, committees, inflation targets and all the rest were designed to ensure that this would be a Labour Chancellorship untainted by failure.
In our book The Gods that Failed (The Bodley Head; 2008), Larry Elliott and I noted:
'The legacy of Lord Lawson, Chancellor between June 1983 and October 1989, has appeared to be an object of both fascination and repugnance to Gordon Brown during his ten years at the Treasury. But then, the parallels between the two men were remarkably (perhaps for Mr Brown, worryingly) similar. Both were pugnacious, self-confident, sometimes arrogant and intellectually capable of holding their own.'
Later, we continued:
'Every time Mr Brown talked of "prudence", "stability", "cautious assumptions" and the rest, he was, in effect, saying: "I may have thick black hair, a huge brain and enjoy knocking seven bells out of my opponents, but I am not Nigel Lawson."'
Now, as with the Barber Boom and Lawson Boom, we have talk of Mr Brown's 'spending splurge' - the latter is not a proper word in my book, but that may come as little comfort to the former Chancellor.
He ought to look on the bright side. Lord Lawson, for example, is enjoying a remarkable second (or perhaps third) act, a respected figure much in demand.
I look forward to The Gordon Brown Diet Book.
Give it time.
3) An end and a continuation
SOME years ago, The Daily Telegraph published a Doctor Who short story for Christmas, the chief plot device of which was a mysterious scrawled note asking the Time Lord to keep an eye on a British boy over the years, throughout his life. The good doctor did so, of course, but at the story's end it emerged that, because of the way time travel 'works', the note was a copy for which there had never been an original.
I first posted here on May 19 2009, and eventually developed the idea of using it as a PS to my economics-editor's column in The Mail On Sunday, a place where the column's ideas could be expanded and at the tail end of which more esoteric subjects (old books, favourite records, strong views on good beer) could be explored.
As of this weekend, it will be a post-script without a script of which to be post, as today sees my last column. After more than 12 very happy years on the paper, I am leaving. But I plan to keep the blog going, albeit with the main post on Saturday rather than Sunday, so tune in (or whatever is the online equivalent) next weekend.
You can leave comments at the end or feel free to e-mail me at dan.atkinson@live.co.uk
Thanks again for reading and enjoy the rest of the weekend.
Going South: Why Britain Will Have A Third World Economy By 2014, by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson is published by Palgrave Macmillan