Bernard Ingham: He looks like a schoolboy, but George Osborne has mastered the priorities

He has been Shadow Chancellor for nearly five years after a short spell as Shadow Chief Secretary whose job is to learn about public

expenditure control. He has also shadowed the Economic Secretary in the Treasury and has had experience of employment issues as Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary.

If anyone has served an apprenticeship to the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer, he has. What is more, Osborne has grasped certain basic truths, which elude our tragically deluded Prime Minister, if not his Chancellor.

The first is that you cannot run a successful Britain on debt. After 13 years of a Labour Government, we are up to our ears in it. And every day that Gordon Brown delays an election adds to the bill. This may be deliberate to make Osborne's job more difficult. But whether deliberate or not, it is profoundly irresponsible.

No one should be surprised at this. We have a Prime Minister who has not an ounce of responsible statesmanship in him. He is a narrow, shallow party political hack who would prefer to dish the Opposition than do the right thing. Hence his wilful refusal openly to cut

expenditure before the election in the face of a budget deficit of

178bn.

I suspect Roy Jenkins, a prime example of a responsible Labour

Chancellor, is turning in his grave and that Denis Healey is as unhappy as Alistair Darling, the present Chancellor, seems to be. As Darling says, we are skating on thin ice. Let's hope we don't fall through.

The second truth Osborne has grasped is that you cannot run a

successful Britain that is over-taxed and over-regulated. You have to give people and companies something to shoot for and room to do it.

Osborne galvanised politics by promising to raise the threshold for inheritance tax. He knew what he was doing. He wanted to give people something to work and save for – and what better thing to work and save for than your family.

He knows that what he has to do over the next five years is get

Britain's financial affairs in order partly by recreating an enterprise economy. I say recreate because it is clear beyond doubt that Brown's

13 years have strangled it. There is not a business organisation that is not publicly champing on the bit of Treasury burdens and threatening to sling their hook from these islands, as they say in Hebden Bridge.

The third truth Osborne has recognised is that there is so much waste in Brown's Britain that some pretty deep cuts are there for the taking without damaging essential services, provided we tighten up a public service that has grown self-indulgent and sloppy.

What did Lord Warner, a former Labour Health Minister, say last week? Why, he charged NHS management with "monumental incompetence" driven by "too much money given too quickly".

That is the story of Brown's client state: corrupted by his gross extravagance with taxpayers' money, all the better, he thinks, to buy votes.

It is frankly as incredible to argue that massive savings cannot be made in public spending as it was to watch our Prime Minister proclaim before Chilcot that he gave the military everything they needed to

fight wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Of course, timing is all in cutting spending and taxation but the people and the world's financiers are at one in wanting to see both. Osborne knows this requires a combination of judgment and determination.

Tories who are inclined to witter about Osborne's less than commanding presence as the polls slump should recognise you don't need a foul temper and a clunking fist to run a successful economy. You need the right ideas and the right determination.

We know more about Osborne's consistency than his will. But consistency and will go together, as Margaret Thatcher so successfully demonstrated.

If there is no iron in your soul, you tend to be all over the place.

It is, of course, true that Kenneth Clarke has rescued an economy before and exudes both experience and bonhomie. But we need a young man for the gargantuan task a Tory government would face.

In any case, if this is what Brown's "experience" has produced, for

God's sake bring on the "novices" PDQ.