“When [Blair] heard his anointed successor announcing with a dramatic flourish at the end of his speech a cut in the basic rate of income tax (a cut which was to be paid for by the abolition of the 10p rate that had been slipped out earlier) his grin froze in horror.
There’s a certain amount of Blair nostalgia in the Labour party at the moment as Gordon Brown struggles at Number Ten. That feeling is only going to be heightened by Rachel Sylvester’s column in the Telegraph this morning which contains this great bit of reporting:
He returned to Downing Street, complaining that the Budget was a disaster that “played into all the worst perceptions of Gordon”.
Mr Brown, Mr Blair told colleagues, was trying to pull the wool over people’s eyes by giving the impression that his Budget was a tax-cutting package when it was not. The whole thing would, he predicted, soon unravel.”
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