You’ve got to laugh. Well, I suppose you don’t have to. But, excuse me, I’m going to. It’s an odd thing to do at the beginning of a column in which I want to advocate a new political strategy, but it can’t be helped.

You see, reading all those stories about Gordon Brown and pensions, I found myself conjuring up in my mind all those meetings, the hours we spent, the hours we wasted, really. We sat there, scratching our heads, trying desperately to find a way of explaining the advanced corporation tax credit on dividends in a way that would be understood by the average voter, in a way that would explain to them why it mattered. It was not fruitful endeavour.

At one point, one of the others round the table exclaimed: “The problem is, Danny, that I understand the dividend tax credit when you explain it to me and I understand it a couple of hours later when I speak about it. But then it just goes.” I was too ashamed to admit that this meant that he held the information in his head for longer than I did.

This encounter took place in 1998 when I was the Conservative Party’s research director, briefing members of the Shadow Cabinet on the consequences of the previous year’s Budget. The man who admitted his hazy grasp of the detail was someone with a brilliant mind and a great deal of ministerial experience. If he found it hard going, there was no hope for anyone else.

And you know what? I think Mr Brown realised that only too well. He saw Tory chancellors raise pitiful sums of money from electorally ruinous measures — putting VAT on heating, for instance — and he thought that there must be an easier way. For a few years it seemed he was right, too. His imposition on pension funds barely caused a ripple. Repeatedly, my boss William Hague argued that the Chancellor had raided pension funds; repeatedly the Prime Minister brushed him off, pointing to a buoyant stock market.

And as for you, well perhaps you were very vexed. If so, I’m sorry I missed you when I went knocking on doors during the 2001 election campaign. Perhaps you were out. I regret to inform you that your neighbours didn’t raise the matter.

Which is why I’m laughing. Because things have turned around nicely, haven’t they? Since The Times disclosed the official advice given to him on the dividend tax credits, everyone has been writing straight-up-and-down stories about the pension system being in crisis and people, you, losing money. It’s a political hot topic. Meanwhile, the Chancellor and Ed Balls have been forced to appear live on Sky News saying it is all, er, a little complicated. Then they’ve struggled on for a few minutes explaining how advanced corporation tax credit on dividends works and what a vital reform to company taxation it was, while the viewers’ minds turn lightly to thoughts about what they might cook for dinner. Good luck there, boys.

Yet much as I am enjoying the whole thing, I am compelled to defend Mr Brown and Mr Balls on one part of the whole business, an important part as it happens. Most of the stories on the new documents emphasise that the Inland Revenue and the Treasury gave a warning that the proposed tax change would have a deleterious effect on pension funds. The Government has responded that the official advice was to proceed with the change in any case, because the change was worthwhile. And reading the documents carefully, this defence of its action is quite obviously true.

The damaging and correct charge against the Government is not that it proceeded with a risky reform despite the warnings from officials. It is that it failed to admit that a risk to pension funds existed, even though it knew that it did.

Now you will immediately object that this is standard operating procedure for politicians. And you would be right. Since the dawn of political time, statesmen have been making promises and offering benefits without intimating that any cost is involved at all. No one seems to have spotted that it’s not working any more.

Take the recent Budget. How long did it take for people to realise that the Chancellor’s 2p income tax cut was paid for by tax rises elsewhere? I was in the Commons that day and I’d say ten minutes. Outside Parliament it didn’t take as long.

We are in a new political age. Voters have stopped believing altogether. They don’t believe manifestos, they don’t believe speeches, they don’t believe statistics, they don’t believe policy initiatives, they don’t believe Budgets. Yet politicians continue to behave as if voters do.

I recall in the 2001 election, using focus groups to assess the popularity or otherwise of Conservative policy on asylum. We never got past the fact that no one thought that any politician would do anything. When I listen to Tories who believe that a tax-cut promise would help them to win next time, I realise that they don’t understand that such an offer would be entirely disbelieved.

The great innovation of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton was to replace the Thatcher-Reagan politics of “or” with the Third Way politics of “and” — uniting political ideas that were previously kept separate. Posing as the advocates of both tough crime policy and an antipoverty strategy, for instance. It has been incredibly successful at the ballot box. But now a new tack is needed.

The politics of “but” needs a champion. In an era where politicians lack credibility, why not try something unthinkable? Why not try the whole truth? Why not try saying that a new policy has a cost, that a fresh law may not work, that a reform has some risks? Why not share all the advice, the upside and the downside?

Hard-bitten pols may think me naive. But if they think it works carrying on as they are, then it’s not me that is the naive one.

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