Photo by David Levene

THE wheel of fortune turns swiftly in politics. Gordon Brown pulled off the G20 meeting in London on April 2nd, emerging with a plausible aura of global statesmanship. After a handful of Labour sleaze stories and a misguided statement on YouTube, the prime minister looked more like Richard Nixon: shifty, angry and with a list of enemies to smear. And that was before a downright dishonest budget on April 22nd.

The budget was a crucial one, for two reasons. First, Mr Brown is running out of time—he has to hold an election by June 2010—and Britain seems increasingly fed up with him. The public regards his party with distaste (see article). That's partly because a dozen years in power tends to tarnish: when the home secretary's husband charges the taxpayer for the porn he watches, one gets an inkling that a government's time is up. But it's also because of Mr Brown's character. His strength, which the G20 meeting displayed, is dour pragmatism. Too often, though, he resorts to tribal politics, in a way that seems both scheming and incompetent.

Second, the budget marks the government's attempts to deal with the fiscal consequences of the worst slowdown since the second world war. Mr Brown is partly to blame for this mess, but crisis management should have played to his strengths; instead, it revealed his worst side.

The eye-watering figures

The budget presented a statistical snapshot of the gruesome shape in which Britain now finds itself (see article). Gone are the days when quarters of growth succeeded each other nose to tail and national debt was limited by a fiscal rule to 40% of GDP. Even the Treasury now expects the economy to contract by 3.5% in the financial year beginning this April. That, bad as it seems, is better than many countries (Japan or Germany, for example) can look forward to, as our accompanying leader makes clear. Sterling's fall and Britain's relatively low dependence on manufacturing exports are the main reasons.

Britain's public finances, however, are on some measures the worst of any rich country. It is likely to have a bigger deficit in 2010, as a percentage of GDP, than even the likes of Italy. With the financial heart shot out of the economy, tax revenues have fallen dramatically just as social spending has increased. That is unavoidable; but the government's heavy borrowing, even before recession hit, was not. Now Mr Brown needs to tap the markets for £175 billion ($254 billion) in the current fiscal year and the same the year after. In last year's budget, public net debt was expected to be 39% of GDP this year; now it is put at 59%, and likely to increase to 79% by 2013-14. This outcome would push Britain only to the middle of the rich-country pack. But the rapid increase in borrowing is eye-watering.

Given these constraints, the budget was never going to be pretty. Alistair Darling, Mr Brown's chancellor of the exchequer, looked a harried man as he made what is usually a grip-and-grin sprint to the House of Commons, brandishing the budget in Gladstone's red box. He had to reassure potential creditors that the government had a plan for tightening fiscal policy in the medium term, while convincing voters that any such austerity would not wallop them personally or at once. A hard job, not least because he could not blame his predecessor for the mess; but one in which candour, above all, was necessary. Instead came two all-too-political sleights of hand: a string of over-optimistic economic assumptions and the misleading message that soaking the rich could absolve the other 98% of the population from personal sacrifice.

The fiscal plans are like one of those childish excuses that begin with a little exaggeration and morph into outright falsehood. The theoretical commitment to cut the growth of current spending to 0.7% a year from 2011-12 is to be implemented only after the election; it also relies a lot on the familiar hogwash of “efficiency savings”. It would be unworldly to expect a government on the eve of an election to be explicit about its intended cuts, and the depths of a recession are not the place to wield the axe anyway. What is really galling is that, in order to make the deficit shrink, the Treasury assumes that the economy will start growing again at the end of this year and expand by 3.5% in 2011. This “trampoline recovery”, as the Tories called it, is a far more optimistic view than either the IMF or most private-sector economists take. No prudent prime minister would have allowed it.

The second fiction is that squeezing the rich can absolve the rank and file from privation (other than dearer fuel, tobacco and drink). Mr Darling and Mr Brown propose raising the top rate of tax from 40% to 50% next year (they had already mooted a rise to 45% from 2011-12) on those with incomes over £150,000 and a couple of other bash-the-rich measures. This will irritate the 1-2% of taxpayers affected; but it will hardly solve the problem. That will require broader, more painful measures in the medium term: higher taxes for all, tougher spending cuts, or a bit of both.

Don't quit the centre

This must seem like clever politics to Mr Brown and his crew: folk have been inflamed by the greed and grubbiness of bailed-out bankers. In the short run, a bit of class war may work. But, like Nixon, Mr Brown is already struggling to escape the suspicion that he has a grudge against the world. And for every voter who likes the idea of soaking the rich, there may be several who remember that Labour pledged at the last election not to raise tax rates during the life of this parliament. In turning his back on the revolution in thinking that brought New Labour to power in 1997—that even though few Britons were very rich, many aspired to be—Mr Brown may be quitting the hard-won centre ground too soon. The entrepreneurial classes are now surely the Tories' for the taking.

April offered Mr Brown two shots at reviving his flagging premiership. The G20 went well. But by attempting to use the budget for political advantage rather than engaging the nation honestly in a slow, shared transformation, the prime minister has done neither himself nor his country any favours. The public is losing patience with him, and so is this newspaper.