Darling's 'give-away' lifts Labour

Through the lobbies and corridors of Parliament, a wave of relief swept across the faces of Labour MPs.

It was an extraordinary sight.

After so many weeks of infighting, self-inflicted wounds, abysmal opinion poll ratings and flagellatory memoirs, the men and women of the Parliamentary Labour Party lifted their heads and allowed themselves, for the first time in so long, a small smile.

Alistair Darling's "pre-by-election give-away mini-budget", to quote one MP, was the boon they had all been seeking.

In the members' lobby, just outside the chamber, a senior member of the Cabinet came up to me, cocked his hand behind his ear and said with all due smugness: "Listen to that - the sound of Tory foxes being shot."

Shrugged shoulders

To anyone outside the Westminster village, quite what foxes and shooting have got to do with tax thresholds will have to remain a mystery.

What the minister meant was that the chancellor's £2.7bn borrowing spree had removed the stick the Tories had been using to beat the government.

"The point, one minister said, is that the fine detail does not matter. Labour MPs now have something to tell voters on the doorstep"

Backbenchers rushed around, clenching their fists in relief, assuring me that at last common sense had prevailed.

But how prudent, I asked them, was it to borrow quite so much when the public finances were so tight?

My only reply was a shrug of the shoulders. What of the 1.1 million people on pretty low pay - £6,500 and £12,800 - who have only been partially compensated and will still lose out something in the region of £100 a year?

We can sort that later, I was told.

'Expensive blunderbuss'

And what about what Robert Chote of the Institute of Fiscal Studies called the "expensive blunderbuss approach" of paying most of the £2.7bn to people who were never hit by the 10p rate abolition in the first place?

No problem, MPs said, that just means more cash for hardworking families when they are feeling the pinch.

Will it be enough to save the Crewe & Nantwich by-election for Labour?

We'll see, said a minister, balancing her hands from side to side.

Is it enough to head off defeat in the Finance Bill?

Oh, yes, she said - definitely.

The point, one minister said, is that the fine detail does not matter. Labour MPs now have something to tell voters on the doorstep.

"We have moved away from a position where people think Labour is against the poor. We are back on an even keel," he said.

"We were just in the wrong place and now we are back where we should be."

But as happy Labour MPs fanned out across Westminster, calculators in hand to work out the small print, a small note of frustration remained.

"If borrowing £2.7bn is so easy, why the hell couldn't we have done this weeks ago?" one said.

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