The Sketch: How our brilliant Chancellor could so easily have been a down-and-out

There are moments when you have to admire Gordon Brown's brilliance, at least until the moment you realise it's probably Alastair Campbell's.

Sir Peter Tapsell had risen to bask momentarily in the jeers of the House before declaiming his point: there could never be permanent convergence of exchange rates between Britain and Europe unless the age-old trade cycle was exorcised from the textbooks.

The Chancellor accused him of dogma, of finding another dogmatic reason for ruling out entry to the euro. He then compared the two parts of the Opposition, saying the Tories are against joining the euro quite as dogmatically as the Lib Dems are for it. Only Labour, and more specifically the Treasury, and more specifically the Chancellor, had the wisdom to judge the issue on its merits. That's a very deft piece of rhetoric – it must have originated in Downing Street.

So there are other moments when you begin to think Mr Brown's brilliance isn't an entirely uncontestable proposition. He talks very quickly, and so we believe he has a quicksilver mind. But read back from the shorthand, quite large parts of his discourse look pretty rackety. His answer to Sir Peter was wholly inadequate, for instance. The trade cycle isn't a matter of dogma. It's not a question of faith. It's a fact, like gravity, and if it isn't taken into due consideration will dump you on your economic arse.

Then Matthew Taylor asked the Chancellor about Britain's share of inward investment since the euro was launched (he said we'd lost half of it). Mr Brown dismissed the point, saying "you can't extrapolate from one year – or from three years – to a general picture". I would have thought three years investment data were useful? No? In the matter of sustainable convergence? If a man has been living, breathing and excreting sustainable convergence for the last seven years the public might have expected something a little less stupid than that?

He jeered at Michael Howard on the Opposition front bench for his part in the ERM debacle (our first run at the euro, which destroyed the Tory reputation for economic competence). Mr Howard rose, trailing clouds of darkness, to remind the Chancellor that he – Mr Brown and his party – in opposition, had supported entry into the exchange rate mechanism. Yes, yes, it was true. And it certainly prompted the thought that had John Major not enjoyed that catastrophic victory in 1992, Labour would have inherited the ERM disaster, they would have suffered 15 per cent interest rates and the repossessions, the Tories would have been back within 18 months to take advantage of the natural growth of the late Nineties boom.

What of Gordon Brown then? He would now be drinking extra strength lager behind the 7-11 and babbling endogenous growth theory to doubtful junkies. He would have been the single overwhelming reason why Labour would never have been elected to government again. That is, ever.

As it is, he can listen to Kelvin Hopkins saying Alice in Wonderland things like "Growth doesn't happen by accident: it needs government to pull the macro-economic levers to make it happen" and bask in the monstrous delusions of office.

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