The thing about Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, another of those pesky former mandarins remarked the other day, is that the prime minister has seemed unable to govern with the chancellor, but neither has he been able to govern without him.

You could see what Sir Stephen Wall meant as Mr Brown delivered his 11th and final Budget. The prime minister smiled and cheered in the right places and looked occasionally as if he was genuinely enjoying the discomfort of David Cameron’s Conservatives. But, in between times, you knew from the body language that the Budget did not bear Mr Blair’s political imprint. For a moment it seemed otherwise. A chancellor famous for his dour demeanour borrowed from Mr Blair by deploying a joke – a rather good one – to defuse the furore over the Treasury’s reign of terror in Whitehall. With a nod to Andrew Turnbull, the former cabinet secretary, Mr Brown thanked his civil service “comrades” for all their hard work on Budgets past and present. MPs laughed. Then a flint-faced Mr Brown stepped back into the cab of his Treasury juggernaut.