His public utterances may have been modest and self-effacing, but inside George Osborne must have been dancing a little jig, thumbing his nose and baring his behind like a baboon. Yesterday's GDP figures show the economy growing at an annualised rate of 2.4%, nothing exceptional, but steady and with power to add, a sign, if you like, that things might be returning to normal.
Ed Balls, on the other hand, must have been gritting his teeth as he welcomed the good news, rather like the Australian spin bowler Nathan Lyon, dropped in favour of Ashton Agar only to see the rookie score 98 batting at No. 11 in the first Test. What little I heard of Balls on the airwaves yesterday suggested that he was rather struggling to find a coherent way to criticise the Chancellor, and the headlines this morning indicate that the best he could do was point out that this was the slowest recovery from recession for a hundred years. You can almost hear the voters yawning.
Actually there is something Balls could have said - if the Government had done what we suggested, this moment would have come sooner. It's taken three years for the economy to register significant growth, and we would have managed it quicker.
And that's probably true. But there are two things to say about that.
The first is that Ball's growth would have been achieved by more borrowing, which comes at a price, and higher public spending, both of which would have meant that a Balls Chancellorship would have been very unlikely to accomplish even the modest deficit reduction Osborne has managed. The picture would have been one of Government spending spiralling out of control.
The second is that although Osborne's cuts have been very modest overall, they have nevertheless involved shedding hundreds of thousands of public sector jobs (alongside the creation of many more in the private sector), a fundamental shift in the balance of employment in the UK which is merely a taste of things to come.
Britain has public spending commitments which were unaffordable during the very best of good times (Governments ran deficits during almost all the period of growth between 1992 and 2008, the longest in British history) and are disastrously so now. As Frank Field wrote as long ago as 2004, governments in the future are going to have to provide better public services with less money, not more. Osborne would probably argue that it was good to get this process under way as soon as possible.
If you look back at the Blair/Brown period, perhaps the cruellest thing about it was the creation of expectations regarding public sector services and employment which could not conceivably be sustained. Unwinding those expectations (and those jobs) is going to be one of the most painful things the UK is going to have to do in future. If the obligation of government is to provide a system of support for the needy which is the best it can possibly be within the constraints of affordability, no policy of the Brown years I can think of showed the slightest sign of having factored in the latter consideration.
