The best prime minister we aren't going to have

Who has had the greatest effect on our society in the last 60 years? Aneurin Bevan, William Beveridge, Alexander Fleming, Maynard Keynes and Margaret Thatcher would all have their supporters. I would nominate Paul Chambers, a civil servant and, later, an industrialist. Whereas Bevan created the health service, Beveridge founded the welfare state, Fleming and others discovered penicillin, Keynes made inflation respectable and Thatcher controverted him, Chambers invented Pay As You Earn, perhaps the greatest social change of all.

Before PAYE was brought in during the war, paying income tax was a privilege of the middle classes - like having a telephone or owning a car. Afterwards nearly everyone paid income tax. They had no choice, unless they were self-employed and engaged an accountant.

Of course the self-employed pay tax as well, though they can argue the toss. I had a friend, a political columnist like myself, who believed that they did not have to pay any tax at all. When I demurred, advising him that the Inland Revenue took a different view, he said that I was a nice chap but unfortunately rather naive. Later I read that the Revenue had made him bankrupt in respect of what was even then the relatively small sum of pounds 20,000.

Our obsession with tax accounts for the supplements in the papers, which grow heavier with every year that passes. I had another friend, also engaged in political journalism, who was once partly responsible for the tables that appeared in the Sun. A man of great writing gifts, he was also largely innumerate. The result was that the income tax tables were all wrong.

Nor was employing a person who was ostensibly better qualified a guarantee of accuracy. In 1971, when R H S Crossman was editor of the New Statesman, he decided that, as the paper was put together on a Tuesday, it would be a splendid idea to produce a Special Budget Issue from his room in the Commons (for he had stayed on as an MP). I told him that, as the Statesman hit Scunthorpe on a Saturday, if Scunthorpe was lucky, the details of the Budget would be pretty cold mashed potato by then. I added that, in any case, the NS did not have the resources to publish a special issue such as the daily papers even then put out.

I told him but, as usual, he wouldn't listen. To supervise the operation he appointed the late Roger Opie, economist, fellow of New College, Oxford, an attender at the paper's editorial conference. Alas, Opie proceeded to mix up 1,000 and 10,000, with disastrous consequences for the special issue. Crossman gave him the sack for unreliability.

What this proves is that, if you want to know how much tax you are paying, it is better to consult an accountant than to read a paper. Nevertheless, it is possible to discover the outlines of what Mr Gordon Brown is up to. Increasingly he is relying on indirect taxes of one kind and another. Indirect taxes are, as we know, regressive: proportionately the poor pay more than the rich. The tax burden is rising, but to say that the Budget is on that account redistributive is misleading.

It is equally misleading to assert that it is redistributive because additional expenditure (exactly how additional is a matter of controversy) is to go on education and health. Mr Tony Blair's mantra, "education, education, education" is clearly to be replaced with "health, health and a bit of education".

The reason is that Mr Blair and Mr Brown experienced a nasty dose of flu over the winter months and took alarm. They also know that extra spending on health is usually absorbed by higher salaries, by expensive pieces of equipment or by both. Hence Mr Blair's typical piece of bullying and bluster on the Wednesday after the Budget, laying down that he was going to take charge himself and somehow - it was not clear precisely how, but somehow - to ensure that the additional money would produce perceptible benefits.

The Government came to power with roughly two sets of promises. One concerned constitutional matters which, with the exception of freedom of information, the Government has more or less kept, even if there has been trouble along the way. The other set was to do with more mundane matters which were supposed to interest the voters: in ascending order of the importance attributed to them, transport, health and education.

Health and education have now switched positions. On both Mr Blair's original promise was not to innovate but, in one of his favourite words, to "deliver". This is what he has so far failed to do. That is why the Budget is as much Mr Blair's as it is Mr Brown's. It is not redistributive to want a respectable system of education or a decent health service. Both may entail higher taxation, much of it indirect and consequently the reverse of redistributive. It is erroneous to suppose that either service is used only by the poor. This is the Daily Mail fallacy.

That paper has been successful partly through flattering its readers by telling them that they are all members of the middle class, even when they are patently nothing of the kind - and that they are richer than they really are. Thus they all send their children to private schools, take out private medical insurance, wear expensive clothes, attend smart parties, much else along the same lines in the realm of fairyland. When Mr Brown allots money to schools and hospitals he is taking away cash that ought rightly to go to lowering their taxes and giving it to the undeserving poor instead (for in Mail-land the poor are all by definition undeserving).

The corollary is the "heartlands" fallacy, sometimes called the "core vote" fallacy. It is all very confusing. For while Middle England resides predominately in the South East, the heartlands and the core voters are supposed to be located somewhere else in the middle and assumed to be the sole users of state schools and hospitals. They will duly demonstrate their gratitude, or so it is hoped. In fact Mr Brown was trying to appeal to everybody, as any politician does most of the time. Several papers wrote of his speech as "Brown's Bid for Leadership". It was more his attempt to win the election. In a year he may well have room to make more straight tax cuts. This is what Roy Jenkins declined to do before 1970 and was blamed by some of his colleagues, such as Lady Castle, when Labour lost the election. He has since defended himself with his customary elegance.

There is no means of knowing whether Labour would have won if Lord Jenkins had behaved differently. Whatever the guess, he certainly deserves to be remembered as the only successful Labour chancellor apart from Mr Brown. Four of our 11 post-war prime ministers had previously been chancellor: Winston Churchill, Harold Macmillan, James Callaghan and John Major. Two other former chancellors, R A Butler and Hugh Gaitskell, might have been prime minister if they had been luckier. My guess is that Mr Brown will join the latter more distinguished duo.