Clarke ranks the Brown bubble just below the South Sea — the corruption absent, the credulity fully supplied — and files the 2010 Budget as the last sad epitaph to a history of failure.

30 March 2010, days before the dissolution of the Parliament that had contained the crash. Darling's final Budget had halved nothing and settled nothing; the deficit stood above 11 per cent of GDP and the election to come would be fought, as Clarke says here, on which party could be trusted to close it. Clarke speaks with a unique double authority — the last Chancellor to balance the books, whose 'golden legacy' even Brown's allies conceded, and the shadow minister recalled from the backbenches precisely because the crisis made experience fashionable again. The speech is late-vintage Clarke: unhurried, anecdotal (an evening with a South Sea Bubble history as Budget preparation), naming Bush and Brown in the same breath of negligence in a way transatlantic courtesy usually forbade, and readable now as the opening statement of the austerity argument that dominated the following decade. Within six weeks he was Lord Chancellor in the coalition whose formation this Budget's arithmetic all but dictated; Brown's reputation began its long contested rehabilitation-by-comparison; and the debate Clarke framed — whose bubble, whose negligence, whose cuts — was still structuring British politics when the next crises arrived to bury it.

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