Fraser Nelson

When Alistair Daring admitted last week that there would indeed be job losses arising from the proposed National Insurance hike, it would have struck Gordon Brown and Ed Balls like root canal surgery. This blows wide open the main part of Brown's election deceit: asking the public to look at the advantages of the borrowing, and not contemplate the flip side to the debt coin. Not to ask where the repayments will come from, or the impact of those repayments on the jobs of the future. No wonder Darling is today being made to claim the opposite. The grim truth is that every job "protected" now, due to debt, will be more than balanced out by money taken away from the economy in the form of the interest needed to serve that debt.

It took a while, but I spotted Labour’s April Fool trick: an attack document on the Tory economic agenda. It looks real at first, but when you go through it the con becomes transparent. APRIL FOOL ONE: “The Conservative Party wants to face two ways at this election, promising extra tax cuts and spending commitments while at the same time claiming they would reduce the deficit further and faster than Labour’s plan to halve it in four years.” REALITY: Labour pretends to be unaware of the basic economic concept that if you have a lower tax rate, business grows faster – generating more revenues. There is such a thing as a self-financing tax cut, which is why the top rate of tax has fallen around the world over the years.

Michael Scholar: hero. The newish head of the UK statistics authority is finally coming to the aid of the statistics nerds who have been protesting that Gordon Brown makes things up. Normally, the ONS do not censure Mr Brown when he misrepresents their data: that's not their job. But as head of the Statistics Authority, Sir Michael has - wonderfully, inspirationally - written an open letter to the Prime Minister telling him not to lie. Well, not quite in so few words, but this is the plain implication. What is significant is that Sir Michael is using his job to protect  the integrity of statistics in Britain. One of my favourite ever facts is that "65 percent of the UK population do not believe statistics".

Blair's return will be worth a good 2-3 points to the Tory lead. Like Mandelson, he can dazzle journalists who admire his tradecraft. Like Mandelson, he is loathed by the public who see a snake oil salesman. Blair mis-sold the country a project in 1997, and delivered none of what he promised (and it was with those broken 1997 problems in mind that the News of the World backed the Conservatives last weekend). He is not very popular now. When he gave evidence to the Chilcott Inquiry, the crowds came from near and far to denounce him. One placard, which I found outside my office, said "Blair is a war criminal" then someone had taped below it "and a w****r" but without the asterisks.

George Osborne has just set the scene for tonight's Chancellors' debate by announcing something neither Darling or Cable will be able to match: a tax cut. It's a real one, it will benefit some 20m workers and (best of all) it will be paid for by spending cuts. While the amount is not huge - everyone on under £43,000 will be £150 better off - it indicates the route the Conservatives would go down in government.   Trusting people with their own money, and stoking the recovery by cutting the tax on jobs. Here are the main points: 1) Osborne would raise National Insurance threshold in Apr11. One of the many booby traps Brown laid for the country after the next election is a national insurance hike of 1 percent, for both employer and employee.

The News of the World's endorsement of the Conservatives today is worth reading. It has taken some time and much soul-searching for the paper to make this decision. Papers, even under the same proprietor, have different readerships with different outlooks on life. The Sun came out for the Tories on the last day of the Labour conference last September, but its stablemate has taken far longer. It has been firm in its denunciation of Brown's failings but – like many voters – it has looked long and hard at just how a Tory government would correct them. The reason for its endorsement now is laid out in the leading article. It started with the reasons for why it backed New Labour in 1997 – what would it change?

Darling has now exposed as false the Brown/Balls dividing line of "investment vs cuts". If Labour were to win, he said, the cuts would be worse than anything seen under Thatcher in the 1980s. This is Darling's problem: he's a dreadful liar. The IFS today laid out the scale of the cuts that would happen whoever wins the election, and the below graph is worth reprinting. Overall spending falls 12 percent (once dole and debt interest are taken into account). So when Darling says this is worse than anything in the 1980s, he is simply stating a fact. You'd never catch Balls or Brown doing that, by the way, and I hope that, when either pop up for interview, they will be asked if they agree with their Chancellor's assessment.

It's unusual for Chancellors to stand with their wives on the steps of the Treasury on budget day, and to see the Darlings together this morning gives an indication of what they have been through. Brown doubtless thought him an automaton when he appointed him to the job - but I was wrong to say that he would be "no more a Chancellor than Captain Scarlett was an actor". He has defied Brown, bringing moderation and much-needed dullness to the worst fiscal crisis in Britain's peacetime history. In James's political column last week he suggested that Darling calls his autobiography "the forces of hell" - that he would defy Brown like that takes some guts. It felt strange to praise Darling in the editorial of tomorrow's magazine, given that he has presided over this fiscal collapse.

In the News of the World today, I propose a new tax on the rich: specifically, on ex-ministers who go on to earn a crust advising companies how to avoid the regulations with which they have saddled the British economy. I proposed this before the news broke about Byers and Hewitt etc, but their appalling story makes it all the more pertinent. The Nelson tax should be above the top rate, and imposed on any activity such as giving speeches to the Chinese, lobbying, consultancy, etc. - anything which trades from contacts or reputation built up while serving the taxpayer. It would not be levied on activities which the ex-minister could plausibly claim he would have taken on anyway. So if Blair were to return to law, his earnings would be taxed at the normal rate.