Rachel Sylvester in The Telegraph writes:
"There was a fixed smile on Tony Blair's face as he sat through Gordon Brown's final Budget in the House of Commons last year.
The then prime minister had been given the customary 48 hours' notice of his Chancellor's intentions but he had not been told how Mr Brown would present the Government's tax and spending plans to Parliament and the country.
When he 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.
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."
Of course, it has unravelled and Gordon Brown is well on the way to experiencing the deserved hatred of the majority of the population and into the record books not as a "political colossus" or "economic genius" but as an inept politician and the mastermind behind the near bankrupting of the UK. Successful and well-loved ex Prime Ministers used to awarded a title or a property by a "grateful nation". Maybe in Gordon's case the ungrateful nation could take back his state funded final salary pension, after all he has screwed up most of the UK population's pensions in one way or another.
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