Researchers have discovered a change in the British character: a new unwillingness to queue. The finding may have brought a grimace to Gordon Brown’s face, since he has stood in line behind Tony Blair, champing more or less noisily, for nine years. The wait is almost over. For better or worse, Brown’s premiership draws near.

The prime minister’s plight is pitiable. Before the Iraq war he might have been that rarity, a political leader who chose to depart at the height of his power and the peak of his popularity. Instead, he has joined the long list of those who overstayed. Last week newspapers on the right and left called on him to quit.

He is sinking into a quagmire of self-manufactured sleaze. His reputation is ruined because he promised cleaner politics but has made them dirtier. Just as Charles C Boycott and Patrick Hooligan usefully bequeathed their names to the English language, so our prime minister risks supplying us with a handy new noun. “Blairism” will be the word whenever “hypocrisy” seems too tame.

Brown’s priority when he succeeds Blair should be to present himself as more honest than his predecessor. He has certain advantages. Since 1998 he has shunned the high life. Before that, he was too fond of Geoffrey Robinson’s hospitality. The Coventry Northwest MP funded a blind trust that helped to pay for Brown’s office and research activities when Labour was in opposition.

When newly appointed, the chancellor and his adviser at the time, Charlie Whelan, used to enjoy watching football in Robinson’s penthouse at the Grosvenor House hotel in London’s Park Lane. But while serving in the Treasury, Robinson was forced to apologise to the Commons for undeclared interests, and fell from office after making an undisclosed loan to Peter Mandelson. Since then, Brown has avoided him and eschewed luxury, displaying no penchant for dubious Italians or Caribbean islands.

Whether that makes him honest is debatable. Every budget, last week’s included, is a masterpiece of deceit and obfuscation. When the chancellor’s golden rule on public borrowing across the economic cycle is in danger of being broken, he alters the dates of the cycle. Brown understates the nation’s indebtedness by leaving off the balance sheet the liabilities accumulating on public sector projects that are privately financed.

The Treasury Red Book that accompanies each budget used to be wholly reliable because it was written by officials free from political interference, but now it bears new Labour fingerprints. The move to make the government’s statisticians independent, announced in the budget, would not be necessary if their work had not been progressively debauched by the government and the Treasury in particular.

Pundits have crawled over the chancellor’s text to discover whether the next prime minister will be new Labour. Some see his speech as a defiant declaration that he will tax and spend. Certainly any leeway that he had to reduce tax he used instead to increase the state’s largesse, for example by creating a national bus pass scheme for older people.

In fact it is many years since the government’s economic policy was new Labour. Brown has pushed up the tax burden and public spending much as his old Labour predecessors did. The difference is that he has taxed more stealthily and a growing economy has masked his work.

Like his forebears, he hasn’t much to show for it. He poured funds into the NHS without requiring reform. Money has leaked into higher pay and more administration. Only a fraction of the extra cash has improved patient care. The state of the NHS is Brown’s responsibility. It is the unhappiest part of his Treasury legacy, so he did not mention health in his speech.

Vehicle excise duty for cars provides a beautiful vignette of Brown’s chancellorship. It ought to be the simplest of taxes and it could be charged at a single rate. Under Brown, there are now 13 rates, such is his urge to micromanage the economy. A differential of £5 here and there nudges us towards smaller engines or greener combustion systems. Most of his objectives could be more easily achieved by raising the tax on fuel. But since the street protests of September 2000 he has been scared off his early ambition steadily to drive up prices at the pumps.

That retreat tells us a lot about the chancellor. Despite the bravura of his budget performance, he is too anxious about a backlash to push ahead with raising the tax burden further. That constrains what he can do on public spending. He will increase it by less than 2% per annum in the years ahead compared with 5% between 2000 and 2005.

People need not worry that Brown might go back to being old Labour. In reality that is what he has been these past five years. In his future we can read an austerity reminiscent of new Labour when it was new.