The Great Gordini has pulled off another conjuring trick. Just like that risky autumn election, he has made those unpopular capital gains tax changes disappear. Neither, of course, ever needed to have caused him such embarrassment. Both the idea of a snap poll in November that so excited the media and the proposals to scrap taper relief on CGT that so enraged the business world were creations of Gordon Brown’s Cabinet. But the climbdown on CGT is arguably more damaging for Mr Brown’s Government than the reversal on a snap election. People understand risk aversion. They may even feel for a man who has worked for a job his whole adult life and saw no reason to gamble it all simply because a handful of young lieutenants were urging him to go to the polls.

But people have no sympathy for a government that has lost its way. Mr Brown’s chief claim to the premiership was a decade of strong economic management. In the past few months, it has been shambolic.

Some of this (Northern Rock) was bad luck. Some of it (playing catchup on inheritance tax) was bad timing. And some of it (scrapping taper relief on CGT) was bad judgment. Now, Mr Brown and his Chancellor Alistair Darling seem to want to make amends for the CGT fiasco, not by withdrawing their proposals but by buying-off small business with the promise of up to £100,000 in tax relief.

This appears to be worse than the standard U-turn. It’s more like an O-turn: a dizzying political manoeuvre that involves going round and round and round. For the new proposals, like the old ones, have the element of surprise but lack sufficient consultation. For all Mr Darling’s admirable commitment to tax simplification, they add another layer of complexity to the tax code. They do not explain the logic behind the 18 per cent tax on private equity’s gains. They do not address the indexation of CGT, which punishes entrepreneurs. And they leave in place the potential upside for property speculators.

This is an apology after the fact, it is not necessarily a remedy. Worse, it was accompanied by a footnote: apparently Mr Brown considered raising the threshold for inheritance tax but postponed it in favour of the absurd 2p income tax cut that was the final flourish of his last Budget.

The implication, of course, is that even the inheritance tax changes proposed by Mr Darling were not his own idea but Mr Brown's. It’s as if the Chancellor’s efforts to establish himself as his own man have been exposed as a trick of the light, just as his predecessor’s reputation for prudence and competence suddenly vanishes into thin air.

james.harding@thetimes.co.uk

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