Politics | 9 May 2009

Some secrets are too vulgar to be disclosed by any political party. Gordon Brown’s radical cuts agenda, encoded in the small print of the Budget, is one such secret. The Prime Minister doesn’t want to admit to it, as it contradicts his pious claim that ‘you can’t cut your way out of recession’. David Cameron doesn’t want to call attention to the question of cuts either, as he would be asked where, precisely, the Tory axe would fall. The Liberal Democrats, meanwhile, are against cuts, but also against more debt — a conundrum as yet unresolved. So it suits everyone in Westminster to keep quiet.

The pain is scheduled to start in April 2011, to last for three years and utterly to transform British politics. The unannounced blueprint, which the Institute of Fiscal Studies painstakingly reconstructed from the fragments scattered across the Budget, is for cuts of 7 per cent over these years — the sharpest, most sustained budgetary retraction attempted by any postwar government. And — in the unthinkable event that Alistair Darling’s comically optimistic forecasts are proven wrong — the cuts may be far deeper.

George Osborne is not relishing this in the slightest. He has two shields. One is his proposed Office for Budget Responsibility, a quango whose purpose would in effect be to instruct the government to spend less and to help the Chancellor make his arguments. The next shield is of the human variety: Osborne’s plan is to put Philip Hammond in charge of all cuts, tasked to set budgets and take the media bullets. In return for becoming Minister to be Hated, Mr Hammond will be given more power, in effect assuming the role of deputy Chancellor.

It says much about the self-discipline of the Conservative front bench that so little of the internal wrangling over the cuts ahead has come out in the open.