It is going to be all Gordon, all day today. He will be telling us how we live in a heaven on earth and tractor production in the Urals is up 500% since the last 5-year plan.

Meantime the government spends even more than it taxes us to the tune of something like £100,000,000 a day. The BBC always like to tell us it costs less than a newspaper a day, well Gordon overspends three newspapers a day for every man, woman and child in the country – every day.

The result? Inflation at the highest since 1991, government indebtedness out of control and the whole public sector pay and prolifigacy being done off-balance-sheet means the City is demanding more and more to hold government debt. His main boast is that he removed monetary policy from his control by ceding interest rate decision making to the Bank of England. The longest sustained period of growth in generations that he boasts about began under the Tories after we came out of the ERM system – a decision he bitterly opposd at the time. Child poverty rates were lower under Thatcher, youth unemployment is higher now than it was in 1997 and social mobility is lower than it was under Thatcher as well. Everything he has meddled with has become overly complex and muddled. Ask any Blairite why after ten years the welfare state and the public sector remain largely unreconstructed and they will tell you it is because of Gordon’s obstructionism. The business sector is groaning under the weight of over-regulation and over-taxation, Britain has tumbled from the top to the bottom of the competitiveness tables. In benign times he has had no major economic disaster, but no economic success either.

For all his talk of reform and renewal of public services for the benefit of ordinary working people, remember when he dazzles his new sincere smile, he went private for it…