Gordon Brown delivered his Budget day speech with his usual panache. The jokes to put down the Tories. The billions extra sprayed here and there – education spending in England rising by £10bn a year between next year and 2010, measures aimed at lifting 200,000 more children out of poverty, for example. But in private, the chancellor must be spitting teeth.

Chancellors, in these days of an increasingly globalised economy, have less control over what happens in the UK than once they did. But by any measure, this chancellor has been a successful one.