Denis the menace, our rusty Iron Chancellor…

THE CHANCELLOR'S budget would have brought delight to that joyless protagonist of austerity, Sir Stafford Cripps, who darkened the gloom of life in Britain during Labour's first postwar government. And, indeed, Denis Healey is of the Crippsian mould, an Iron Chancellor so doctrinaire in his thinking that he has gone rusty around the edges.