Gordon Brown has proved the Mark Twain of British politics. He, too, has been in a position to read his own obituaries. There have been dozens of assessments of his ten-year tenure at the Treasury in the media over the past few days; there will doubtless be many more before what is generally assumed to be his final Budget speech is delivered on Wednesday.

It cannot be said that all of this analysis, worthy though it is, sparkles with originality. It boils down to: “Three cheers for the Monetary Policy Committee, a slap on the back for avoiding the euro and isn’t it shocking that higher public spending has not produced far sharper improvements across the public services.” That’s it.

It is perhaps more interesting to look back at what various economics experts wrote immediately after each of the Chancellor’s ten previous Budgets. I have been through that torture (not a decent joke in any of them). Like the career of Pablo Picasso, they fall into three distinct stages. First, the 1997 to 2000 period, where Neo-Impressionist influences can be detected and when the consensus was “skilful so far, yet the tough decisions are still to come”. Then the Blue Period, 2000 to 2005, in which almost everybody said: “He has got away with it this long, but his luck will run out shortly.”.

Finally, 2005 to now when full-blown Cubism has been on show with pundits conceding: “He has somehow defied reality, how will his successor manage?”

Dominant Chancellors normally demonstrate one of two attributes. They are either admired as policy technicians (as Nigel Lawson was) or as political animals (as Ken Clarke was). Mr Brown’s standing, perhaps unique among those who have held the post since Gladstone, is that he has both of these qualities. Michael Barone, the respected American political commentator, wrote of the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan that he was “the greatest thinker among politicians since Lincoln and the greatest politician among thinkers since Jefferson”. Much the same could be said of this exceptionally forceful Chancellor.

And if the secret of politics, like comedy, is timing, then Mr Brown is surely ending on a high. He will be able to report that growth in Britain this year is likely to be the strongest of any of the G8 nations, fuelled by record levels of business investment as well as consumers. The temptation will be enormous for him to rest on his laurels, stick to his familiar course, tweak the Opposition for some of the daft Private Frazer predictions they made a couple of years back that we’re all doomed, and then to sit down to the plaudits of his backbenchers.

It must, nevertheless, be resisted. Mr Brown should be treating this as a transition Budget both for the man who will replace him and for his own shift into 10 Downing Street. This requires him to set out two initiatives — one “right wing”, the other “left wing”.

The economy has been in a hearty condition for more than a year now. Despite this, not only the overall opinion polls — which are affected by numerous factors, not least the long-drawn-out handover of power at the top, but the specific questions about economic competence and management — are worse for the Government today than two years ago. Why?

It is, I think, because this is a boom without many serious beneficiaries. Those who have been in work throughout this period have seen the rise in their real incomes squeezed by higher inflation and an increase in mortgage repayments. The numbers of unemployed have only just started to fall, even though employment is at record levels. This apparent contradiction is explained by the influx of workers from Eastern Europe (which has been a massively positive reform, in my view, although I should acknowledge that not many cut-price Polish newspaper columnists have arrived to offer unsettling competition). The economy may be in a magnificent state but most of the population do not sense that.

Which is why the Chancellor should, for patently political reasons, send a signal on taxation. The best way to do this would be with that retro instrument the 1p in the pound cut in the basic rate of income tax, not one of those clever-clogs schemes involving allowances, credits or thresholds that only he, his sidekick Ed Balls and my fellow columnist Anatole Kaletsky actually understand. Cutting tax is like striptease. It should be obvious what is happening. Mr Brown may relish the delicious irony of reducing tax at the same time as his partisan opponents are contorting themselves in their efforts not to promise anything on tax for fear of looking like Attila the Hun on the subject of public expenditure.

Then the Chancellor has to do something about the National Health Service.

It is absolutely surreal that Labour, having thrown billions upon billions at this sector, is facing demonstrations from junior doctors who may have no hospitals to practice in and protests up and down the land about the reorganisation of facilities that, no matter how rational they may be (and they usually are), look as though they are being driven by short-term financial deficits.

In fewer than two years, Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary, has managed to take a massive Labour advantage in the polls on health — which was attained back in the 1980s, when the party was in permanent opposition — and blow it. Nothing quite like it has been witnessed since Lord North lost the American colonies. It is crazy.

So the Chancellor should engage in another rather retro activity — the bailout. He should throw whatever resources he can muster at hospital deficits and eliminate them. He must pledge that the junior doctors will enjoy a modern version of the old Dock Labour Scheme, which guaranteed port workers a job. He should fire Ms Hewitt (preferably from a cannon) the instant that he replaces Tony Blair and send in Yvette Cooper.

Cutting tax and bailing out the NHS each demand money. There are bean-counters out there who insist that Mr Brown does not have the resources to engage in such indulgences. They ignore one very crucial element in the medium-term outlook for the Exchequer. This is the astonishing rebirth of London as an international financial centre, a process that is destined to acquire yet more momentum over the next decade.

If Mr Brown and the next Chancellor are smart, they will nurture this development zealously. The City’s emergence as the crucible of capitalism is, paradoxically, the mother of all “get out of jail free” cards for the Labour Party. The implications of this trend for corporation tax (and, indeed, income tax) receipts are the equivalent of scooping the global lottery jackpot.

This Budget should thus be the last of the Chancellor Brown era and the first of the Prime Minister Brown one. If he defuses tax and the NHS, he will be laughing. It will also make his claims for his time at the Treasury seem credible with voters. They may conclude, as Mark Twain asserted in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, that: “There were things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.” Who could ask for more, really?

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