Life does not get much better than this for the opposition. After years of seeing his predecessors baited and beaten by Gordon Brown, George Osborne is in the position of doing the goading. The job of shadow chancellor, long a poisoned chalice, has become a sparkling glass of champagne.

Brown knows what this is like. He took over as shadow chancellor after Labour’s demoralising election defeat in April 1992. Many in the party thought if they could not win in those circumstances of painful recession they could never win at all.

But Brown saw the Tories’ economic reputation shattered by Britain’s forced exit from the European exchange-rate mechanism (ERM) on “Black Wednesday”, by tax rises and by a squeeze on public spending.

The more economic misery has piled up in the past 12 months, the more the Tories have made hay. On the key opinion-poll question of “economic competence” — which party is trusted to raise living standards? — Brown and Alistair Darling enjoyed a seven-point lead over Osborne and David Cameron a year ago, according to YouGov, The Sunday Times’s pollsters.

Labour’s Black Wednesday moment came with the prime minister’s shenanigans last autumn over whether to call an early election. That forced Darling into a shamelessly political and hastily assembled pre-budget report, including copycat announcements on inheritance tax and non-doms, which voters saw through.

Osborne and Cameron moved into the lead on economic competence, a lead that has grown in recent months and at present is a two-to-one advantage. It recalls the kind of lead the Conservatives enjoyed over Labour on this question in the 1980s.

The chapter of accidents has got longer, whether the botched nationalisation of Northern Rock, the damage of the abolition of the 10p income-tax band and changes to capital-gains tax, or the further damage of retrospective road-tax rises.

Osborne and his team acknowledge that they are beneficiaries of an economy slowing towards at best stagnation, a chronically weak housing market and a sharp squeeze on household finances. But they think the shift goes a lot further than that.

At the beginning of the year Brown and Darling stood shoulder to shoulder at Downing Street press conferences, the aim being to demonstrate that compared with their lightweight opponents, these were the men you could trust to steer the economy towards better times. As a strategy it has flopped, so far at least.

So has the idea that you should grab hold of nurse for fear of something worse. Voters may not yet know enough about how well or badly a Tory government would run the economy, but they show no sign of returning to Labour’s clutches.

So Labour is trying a new tack. Last week Yvette Cooper, the Treasury chief secretary, launched an attack on what she called “Cameronomics”, which she claimed was full of “risks and contradictions”, including £11 billion of unfunded tax promises. I hope she ditches the expression Cameronomics and has some better arguments. For her to accuse the opposition of unfunded promises after a £2.7 billion unfunded tax “giveaway” to buy off backbench opposition to the 10p cock-up is just silly.

The next few months will be crucial. Eric Pickles, the Conservatives’ local-government spokesman, said last week Labour could not win the next election (though he added that the Tories could still lose it), but the position is more fluid than when Brown was confidently preparing himself for office more than a decade ago.

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