Brown’s scorched-earth policy will cost his successors dear

Unencumbered by any expectations that he will win the next election, the Prime Minister can focus on his legacy – health, education and international aid – and leave David Cameron with the bill

Bliss it is to be a Conservative this summer. Every day brings a fresh disaster for Gordon Brown and every failure is magnified into a catastrophe. ‘It’s painful to watch – the media are worse to him than they were to John Major,’ one Shadow Cabinet member told me recently. The expectation of a Tory government is near-universal. British ambassadors abroad have started to assure their host countries about David Cameron’s sound intentions. They think it’s all over.

In 10 Downing Street, staff are steadily leaving for the few consultancy jobs they can find, but headhunters are more interested in Tory aides with good connections. Cabinet members most loyal to Mr Brown tell him (and themselves) that anything can happen in two years, though they struggle to say what. One might expect Mr Brown himself to be locked into a state of depression. But all reports suggest he is holding up surprisingly well.

By no means all of this is delusional. Unless his party summons the courage (and the candidate) to oust him, he will remain Prime Minister for another two years – with the full governmental train-set at his disposal. Unpopularity and caustic newspaper editorials will not dethrone him. Labour has a poor record in regicide, and a party which endured Michael Foot for three years and Neil Kinnock for nine years is unlikely to depose of the most formidable street-fighting politician in our times.

Like second-term American presidents, Mr Brown may find this to be a release. Shorn of the need to be re-elected, he can start work on policies he has long believed in but had feared were too unpopular to sell to the country. Most of all, he can raid the budget of his successor by running up debt. Just as retreating armies adopt a scorched-earth policy to deny their enemies an advantage, so Mr Brown can lay some economic landmines as a welcome present for his successor.

For all his failures as a tactician, Mr Brown is a formidable strategist who is more than capable of thinking several years ahead. He inherited a golden economy from the Conservatives, with inflation tamed – and used it to take full advantage of the world economic upturn. A man who has produced several reports with a 2020 deadline will already be thinking how long a Conservative government will last, and what he can do now to curtail it. The answer is to deny the Tories the chance to cut taxes.

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