Gordon Brown is going to win this election for New Labour. Providing he can be persuaded to stop sulking and take part in the campaign, voters will throng to the polls to endorse his miraculous record as one of those rare Chancellors who made us all richer. Well, nearly all of us.
That is the received wisdom. Members of stricken final salary pension schemes, to say nothing of all the employees who cannot join them because they have been closed to new members, may never have noticed that it was Mr Brown who under-mined them by taxing their dividends. Anyway it was too long ago to sway anybody's vote.
Still, it was unsettling yesterday to see research from the Institute for Fiscal Studies examining the result of Mr Brown's 2002 Budget - the one that slammed two per cent on National Insurance a year later on the pretence that they don't count as income tax.
It was nobody's stealth tax. Mr Brown just gave us a year's notice to get used to the idea. The miracle is that when the time came nobody minded.
Companies picked up half the bill and their directors shrugged it off as the least you have to expect from a Labour Chancellor. Private individuals took it on the nose. Not one union managed to get the extra one per cent loaded onto a pay deal, it was said.
We could afford it, apparently, because our still prudent Chancellor's safe pair of hands at the Treasury was quietly enriching us all the time.
It now turns out that it wasn't like that at all. We were poorer. The IFS has established that the taxraising Budget of 20002 caused the buying power of average take-home pay to fall in the 2003/04 tax year - for the first time since the recession of the early Nineties.
Quite apart from NI, which trimmed average incomes by 0.8 per cent, that was the year when the biggest inflationbeating council tax increases under this Government took another 0.3 per cent. On top of this Mr Brown froze the starting point for income tax so that more low-paid people had to pay it.
It is all two years ago now, too long for the fading memory to cost votes. Far worse things have happened under other Governments. Still it worth noting that the myth that Gordon Brown is the Chancellor who never hurt anyone is just that. A myth.
