Borrowing figures out today show Gordon has overshot spending by £2 billion so far this year, the figures for last year have also been revised up and were another £2 billion worse at £39.2 billion for the whole of 2005-06, compared with Gordon’s Budget estimate of £37.1 billion. The City is very unimpressed.

Last week Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, warned that inflation was seeping back. The unemployment rate is now 5.3%, up over 1/2% on the year. The number of unemployed has increased by 199,000 this year, to reach 1.61 million, vacancies are down and redundancies are up. This all despite paying teenagers to go to school and bloating the public sector by half-a-million employees or so since 1997. Even the cheating revised Golden Rule looks in danger.