An unlikely crumb of comfort for Alistair Darling, the beleaguered chancellor, from Tory former chancellor Ken Clarke. Mr Clarke feels Mr Darling’s pain. He went down to defeat at the hands of his own backbenchers after his first Budget 15 years ago. The parallels are uncanny.

Then as now the issue was a tax change. “The Tories imposed VAT on domestic fuel but it was not my idea, it was a leftover from my predecessor Norman Lamont’s last Budget,” Mr Clarke tells me. “Alistair can say that ending the 10p tax band, which is now causing turmoil, was not his idea but his predecessor Gordon Brown’s.” The similarities do not end there. As with the 10p tax, the VAT on domestic gas and electricity was meant to come into effect a year later.

Says Mr Clarke: “We had put up benefits and pensions so most people would have been all right” – as with Labour today – “but the opposition went on and on about starving pensioners. Pensioners were about the only group not affected. The ones hardest hit were wealthy people with big houses and big utility bills.”

Mr Clarke brought the number of rebels “down below the danger level by dint of having long talks with them” yet on the night he still lost the vote. “What did for me is that a few days before, John Major, the prime minister, had withdrawn the whip from eurosceptics who had rebelled over the Maastricht Treaty and the whole bloody lot of them voted against me. Even” – his voice rises in indignation – “those who had been in favour of the measure.”

His revenge was swift. He had tried to help the Scotch whisky industry by being the first chancellor not to raise duty on spirits and his backbenchers loved him for it. Now he said that if they would not give him his fuel tax, he would raise the duty on spirits instead. He warns that if Mr Darling loses the 10p tax vote, he too will have to pay for it with higher taxes or spending cuts.

Mr Clarke did at least try to brace people for a tough spending round and a tough Budget. “Like me, Alistair is facing a huge deficit and he should have faced it head-on but nobody dared to open Gordon’s last Budget as he’s now prime minister.” Does he sympathise with Mr Darling?

“I have a lot of sympathy for him. I faced a crisis in public finances. He faces a crisis in public finances. Of course I inherited an economy on the mend. He’s inherited an economy facing a serious slowdown.” He adds cheerfully: “If it’s really bad all his revenue forecasts will be nonsense.” The sympathetic Mr Clarke, who has been boning up on credit crunches with City people and academics, hopes to speak in the Commons debate next week. His attack will be an inside job.

Paying the piper

Good news! Hopes of forcing taxpayers to fund political parties received a double blow this week. First came news that the government was freezing plans for state funding. On Wednesday a paper by Michael Pinto-Duschinsky for the Policy Exchange pours scorn on claims by Jack Straw, justice minister, that there is a “spending arms race” between the parties. Mr P-D says national election costs have almost halved since 2000 and the gap between the two main parties has narrowed. There has also been a big rise in indirect state subsidies to the political class with higher allowances for MPs and councillors plus the cost of political assistants and advisers. A large chunk of these payments, estimated at £1.75bn over a five-year parliament, finds its way into party coffers, says Mr P-D.

The wheezes are endless: MPs claiming rent for constituency offices; a £10,000 “communications allowance” for MPs – of particular value in marginal seats; MPs’ staff who do party propaganda on the side. Any further rise in state funding and, as Policy Exchange points out, the trend for political parties to become top-down bureaucracies rather than popular democratic institutions will be even more pronounced. The real problem is failing support for all the parties among the public.

The way to make them responsive to what voters want is to force them to raise every penny from individual donations.

Power highs

At 5ft 7in tall, Vladimir Putin (no high heels) is taller than Silvio Berlusconi and Nicolas Sarkozy, both standing at 5ft 5in-plus (with heels). Both can look down on Dmitry Medvedev, a mere 5ft 3in, but are still taller than Napoleon at 5ft 2in (depending on who measured him).

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