Brown longest-serving Chancellor

DROWNED OUT by the elections and the football, an event of genuine historic importance will pass by largely unnoticed today. Gordon Brown will become the longest serving Chancellor in history.

Already his span has been longer than previous masters of the job, such as Nigel Lawson, Stafford Cripps and Winston Churchill.

From today, he exceeds the record of the brilliant Welshman David Lloyd George, who served seven years and 43 days from 1908 to 1915. Only Gladstone, in the mid-19th century, lasted longer than Brown, but he served in separate terms.

In itself, this is enough to gain Brown his place in history. But he has not merely been a long-serving Chancellor; he has been a uniquely dominant one. He has shown how the power of the Treasury can drive and shape all of Government.

The brutal fact is that Brown has wielded much more power over domestic policy than Tony Blair. Blair hates this - and Brown's domestic pre-eminence explains the bitter, hostile, dysfunctional relationship between No 10 and No 11 Downing Street.

Brown, not Blair, has dominated the home agenda. That is why it can be said of the Chancellor that, almost alone among modern politicians, schoolboys will be studying him in 100 years' time.

Massive achievements

THE Chancellor has accomplished what all politicians seek, and scarcely any achieves. He has defined, and created, the age he lives in. Even his opponents have been forced to acknowledge his massive achievements.

Under Brown, unemployment has fallen to its lowest for a generation. So too has inflation. There has been a stability in economic policy-making for the first time since Britain came off the Gold Standard - first in 1914 and finally in 1931 - partly because of the Chancellor's audacious and historic decision to give independence to the Bank of England.

Brown likes to boast that, under him, Britain has enjoyed its longest period of economic growth since records began two centuries ago. This claim is only half true - he tends not to mention that the first five of those years occurred under Tory rule.

The Chancellor looks the part. Sober, forceful, physically squat and powerful, never at a loss, he has dominated the Treasury with sheer intellectual command. Many chancellors - think Lamont, Major, Anthony Barber - are overwhelmed and never cope. Brown can. He is a big man and a massive politician.

Historians will never dispute his dominance, his ambition or his overwhelming intellectual verve. Brown has presided over a gloriously sunny British economy, cutting back on spending when he first came to power and reflating the economy as other nations, like France and Germany, sunk into the doldrums.

Far less easy to judge is Brown's legacy. For he has never dared to challenge the perilous underlying malaise of our modern economy.

The economic growth of which he loves to boast has not come from any new industrial strength. Quite the reverse. Our manufacturing industry, though enjoying a gentle resurgence in recent months, has plunged downwards.

The Chancellor cannot point to a flourishing new high-tech or biotech industry, capable of employing a new nation of skilled and motivated young people. It simply hasn't grown up under his watch.

Growth has been driven instead by rising house prices. Consumer debt has just soared over the £1 trillion mark. For all the Chancellor's talk of stability, it is hard to conceive of a more unstable concoction than the economic components that have fuelled his much-vaunted growth for the last seven years.

Brussels regulation

HIS critics say that when the downturn comes - and it will quite soon - the British economy will find it very difficult to cope.

Meanwhile, steadily and unobtrusively, Brown has made it more difficult for the British people to start new businesses.

He has done little to halt the rising tide of regulation from Brussels, and added formidable new demands of his own. Tolley's Tax Guide for small business - an invaluable handbook for small companies and a useful measure of Government meddling - has almost doubled in size during his seven years at the Treasury.

This is because Brown, unlike conventional Chancellors, does not understand his role as simple management of the nation's finances. He wants to shape the way we behave. Hence his attempts to rebuild the welfare state with hugely complex working tax credits.

There is no denying he has met with some success, that numbers of long-term unemployed have come down and single mothers have been helped back to work.

But there has been a price - the new, labyrinthine bureaucracy that forces small-business people to wade through paperwork when they should be out there gaining new markets.

And too many of his new jobs have come in the public sector. These kinds of jobs, paid for by the taxpayer, do short-term good by boosting the labour market and putting money in the economy.

In the long term, however, they drag us all down by crippling the productive private business sector with greater burdens and higher taxes.

Brown received a golden economic inheritance from Margaret Thatcher. She did the hard work, tackled the unions and slashed much of the bureaucracy and regulation that prevented the British people from getting on with their lives.

The greatest criticism of Brown is that he has gradually put back many of the barriers to wealth and prosperity that she broke down.

There is a growing sense that Brown will not be in the Treasury long enough to be forced to address the consequences of his own decisions. He once classified Chancellors as falling into two types: 'those who fail - and those who get out in time'.

Eye on No 10

BROWN wants out in time - and it is obvious what he wants next. Lloyd George, the great Chancellor whose record Brown has just broken, moved on to No 10. Brown is determined to follow his example.

Lloyd George despised Asquith, the Liberal Prime Minister he replaced. He regarded him as lazy and slothful. For years, he plotted against him and at length he succeeded.

So it is with Brown and Blair. Blair knows - and bitterly resents it - that the Chancellor will be at his throat at the first public sign of weakness.

So it is worth asking, as Brown becomes the longest serving Chancellor in history, whether he can emulate Lloyd George and also become a great Prime Minister.

He possesses many of the qualities: considerable intellect, integrity, vision, and perhaps above all, an over-riding sense of his own destiny.

He has displayed weaknesses too, during his record-breaking term at No 11. He has been too secretive, at times insufferably rude and far too ungenerous to opponents. He has emasculated colleagues and sought to mould them as instruments of his will.

It would have been better if he allowed those around him the freedom to breathe and to make their own decisions. That is why it is by no means pre-ordained that Brown would make a great Prime Minister. The jury is out.

But he has already made his mark as a great Chancellor. That, of course, will be of no interest at all to this impossibly driven man as he breaks records today, not - as the rest of us might - by opening a bottle of champagne, but by settling down to yet more work.

Peter Oborne is political editor of The Spectator.