How Brown prevented Darling tackling the deficit

Gordon Brown looked relaxed, even bored, as he lounged on the front bench on Wednesday while his Chancellor, Alistair Darling, read out his Pre-Budget Report. In fact, the Mole could swear that at one stage the PM even got a little shut-eye.
 
But if what's come out of Westminster since then is even half-right, then it seems Brown's insouciance was masking all sorts of anger and resentment between the two men.
 
Leaks suggest Darling wanted to do more to tackle the deficit and wasn't allowed to by his boss.
 
Brown is in electioneering mode now. He had no intention of making voters who might - just might - keep him in power at the next election feel any poorer than they do already.
 
So he blocked Darling's plan to restore VAT to 17.5 per cent or even - according to some persuasive reports - somewhere above the old rate.
 
Darling's sums showed that a one per cent rise in VAT will raise about the same revenues as a one per cent hike in national insurance - actually slightly more.
 
The Chancellor preferred the VAT solution to the 0.5 per cent increase in national insurance which he feared would be perceived as a tax on jobs. Which was, of course, precisely how shadow chancellor George Osborne painted it.
 
Then there's the matter of the spending cuts needed to bring the national deficit under some sort of control. Again, Darling wanted to show he was ready to bite the bullet and be honest with the electorate about what will be required. Again, Brown - backed by mini-me schools secretary Ed Balls - wasn't having it.
 
As the Guardian's political editor Patrick Wintour puts it, "Some government sources said they found Brown still in denial about the scale of the cuts required. Predicting that the budget would be deeply unpopular, they argued politicians would be given greater respect if they showed leadership and honesty about the difficulties the country faced and the need to cut spending."
 
As a result, the Labour government is left with a hell of way to go to meet its own legal requirement to halve the £178bn deficit within four years. The Institute for Fiscal Studies thinktank (IFS) estimates that Darling has only a 60 per cent chance of meeting the target.
 
David Cameron, frustrated at recent opinion polls which suggest the Tories are way off a resounding election victory, has accused Brown and Darling of behaving like a pair of joy-riders "smashing up" the economy and not caring about the mess they left behind them.
 
Gordo will ignore the jibe and instead enjoy his newfound entente with Sarko. As my colleague Edward Helmore reports today on The First Post, the French president thinks the plan to tax bank bonuses is brilliant. Though he'd like us all to know that, actuellement, it was his idea in the first place. ·