How to rein back public spending? The attempt by George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, to tell the truth this close to a general election is without recent precedent. Margaret Thatcher’s intimations were rather hazier in the run-up to the 1979 election. For its part, nothing in the Labour manifesto of October 1974 indicated that the party aimed to cut government spending by 8 per cent.

Examining the detail-free waffle that passed for Lloyd George’s manifesto in 1918, the electorate could have had little inkling that the single sentence “We must endeavour to reduce the war debt in such a manner as may inflict the least injury to industry and credit” meant cutting peacetime government spending by a quarter.

The problem Gordon Brown shares with Lloyd George is government debt. It stood at 130 per cent of gross domestic product in 1920, a level to which estimates suggest we shall soon return. This comparison, of course, is somewhat unfair to Lloyd George who, unlike Brown, had at least won a war with the proceeds.

But with 30p in the pound snaffled up by income tax, what infuriated those shouldering the post-First World War fiscal burden was the failure of Lloyd George’s Liberal-Conservative coalition Cabinet to rein back a vastly expanded state bureaucracy that showed every sign of entrenching itself in peacetime.

A campaign funded by Lord Rothermere and promoted in his paper, the Sunday Pictorial, highlighted “squandermania” in Whitehall. Two cartoon civil servants named Dilly and Dally illustrated the bureaucratic drain on resources. To show he was doing his bit, Rothermere started serving his guests water rather than wine.

Such gesture politics became far more serious when, in 1921, Rothermere launched his own political party, the Anti-Waste League. It won sensational by-election victories in Dover, Westminster and Hertford.

The Government had got the message. Hoping to circumvent the reluctance of his colleagues to reduce their own departments, Lloyd George appointed a commission of “experts” to identify the cull victims.

The target was to slash public spending by 30 per cent. By 1925, a 23 per cent reduction had been achieved at a sum equivalent to about £100 billion in today’s money. The Civil Service was successfully reduced by 35 per cent. Health spending was protected but, mistakenly, not the education budget. The biggest hit was taken by the Royal Navy, although it could hardly feign surprise given that the German High Seas Fleet was now nestling in the depths off Scapa Flow.

George Osborne will be a courageous politician if he achieves anything on this scale. But at least, unlike Lloyd George, it seems he is insufficiently duplicitous to fight the election promising homes fit for heroes.

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