Dear Gordon, I’m sorry this greeting arrives late, but as you know the Royal Mail service is not what it used to be. In any case, as it is now too late for Christmas I would like to wish you a happy new year – and also remind you that, unlike most recipients of routine seasonal greetings, you are in a position to decide whether the year ahead does turn out to be happy, not only for yourself and your family, but also for me and for 60 million other citizens of Britain. I have another reason for making this a new year, rather than a Christmas, greeting: new year is a time for making resolutions and the most successful resolutions are about things that people will stop doing in the year ahead.

In 2007 you achieved your lifetime ambition of becoming Prime Minister and achieved it through exactly the calm, orderly transition of power that your longstanding supporters, myself included, had always hoped.

This left you free to correct the historic blunders of the Blair period and to take the Government and the Labour Party in any direction you chose. Yet within weeks perceptions of your personality and leadership were transformed in exactly the way your detractors had predicted: rational calculation turned into devious manipulation, caution turned into indecisiveness, determination into dogmatism, long-term vision into inflexibility, seriousness into paranoia. Why did this happen?

The bad news of the year was that your Government’s problems were almost entirely self-inflicted. The good news is that undoing these self-inflicted problems is within your own power.

Denis Healey’s First Law of Holes states that when you are in a hole you should stop digging. The reason why this law is so often cited in politics is revealing: the British do not like overactive government. Voters will always distrust their government and the media will always criticise whatever it does.

This scepticism is what has made Britain the world’s most enduring democracy; it is what makes individualism and eccentricity the proudest features of the British national character; it is the reason why Britain will never live comfortably in the EU and why British pedestrians will never wait for the green man before they cross a road. As a result, governments in Britain are rarely resented when they do too little and always come a cropper when they attempt to do too much.

In this self-denying spirit, let me suggest some of the things you should stop doing if you want to restore your electoral chances and become a successful Prime Minister.

Since you believe, probably rightly, that the economy is the most important issue for voters, I will begin with economics.

The first thing to stop is Alistair Darling’s attempt to “save” Northern Rock. The Chancellor was right to guarantee deposits back in September, when there was still a slim chance that Northern Rock might recover quickly if the global financial markets settled down. But the company now owes taxpayers £25 billion and is irretrievably bankrupt.

If you allow a private “rescue”, you will be handing Sir Richard Branson, or one of the other “bidders” the largest public subsidy yet offered to any private individual by any government anywhere in the world. The British people will see this as an outrageous price for just 5,000 jobs in Labour’s electoral heartland. If the rescue “succeeds” you will be accused of selling Northern Rock on the cheap, confirming your record of financial miscalculations – pension funds, gold sales, Railtrack, London Underground and so on.

If the rescue fails and Northern Rock ultimately has to be liquidated, every week of delay will increase the Treasury’s financial losses and risks. The company should be immediately put it into administration and bought by the Treasury for £1. The depositors could then be instantly repaid and the business liquidated. If this were done immediately, the Bank of England could recover almost all the money it has lent. If there are some modest losses, nobody will blame you at this stage, especially if you present an immediate liquidation of Northern Rock as a recognition of the limits of government. You might start the announcement by recalling King Canute and explaining that government cannot turn the tide of global financial markets.

Speaking of financial tides, remember that your best and most popular decision as Chancellor was to take the Government out of the business of setting interest rates. Now you are Prime Minister you seem to be tempted to start interfering again with monetary policy, by dithering over whether to reappoint Mervyn King or find someone more pliable as Governor of the Bank of England. Don’t succumb to this temptation: Britain next year is likely to face the worst economic slowdown and housing slump since 1992. Any new governor you appoint will be seen, rightly or wrongly, as a political crony, given the task of dismantling the framework of monetary independence you created ten years ago.

If, however, you do reappoint Mr King, further delays in doing so will simply reinforce your indecisive image, as well as reducing perceptions of Bank independence. You will then be blamed for next year’s economic hardships, as well as for any misjudgments or unpopular decisions made by the Bank.

Another self-denying ordinance that you should consider is taxation. Your worst mistake this year was the panicky decision to rush out one of the biggest reforms in Britain’s entire system of capital gains, inheritance and income taxation, in what you planned as a vote-winning preelection Budget. Some of your proposed tax reforms made sense, while others did not, but all are riddled with unintended consequences that should have been ironed out over a long period of consultation. Nobody can begin to estimate the effects of these reforms – notably the taxation of foreign nationals – especially in a year when the City could face its biggest job losses for 20 years. The best thing you could do next year is to announce a moratorium on all tax reforms, delaying the implementation of last autumn’s Budget measures until 2009.

A final economic initiative that you should forget about is your much-vaunted housebuilding programme. Your passion for planning Britain’s housing needs 20 years ahead always appeared Stalinist and hubristic, but next year it will seem simply absurd.

The big housing problem in the next two years will not be a housing shortage, but a glut of unsold houses, accompanied in many areas by falling prices. Government plans to aggravate this glut by adding three million new houses will sound barmy and out of touch with the bread-and-butter issues of people’s lives.

Of course, man does not live by bread alone, so next week I will mention some of the noneconomic issues – foreign policy, justice, environment, public services and Europe – where the Brown Government might benefit from new year resolutions of self-denial. But first, I must rush off to the Boxing Day sales.

Season’s greetings and a happy new year, Anatole

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