Sky's Ian King rates and ranks the UK's chancellors from the past 70 years.
For anyone who was not there at the time, it is almost impossible to describe the depths to which the UK economy had sunk during the late 1970s, the sheer state of decrepitude in the public finances and, indeed, the public realm.
Clarke, again, was a bold chancellor unafraid of taking tough decisions to strengthen the public finances. A fly-on-the-wall ITV documentary, covering his early weeks at the Treasury, captured a moment at which officials spelled out to the new chancellor just how strong an economy he had inherited. Brown growled in response:"What do you want me to do? Send a thank-you letter?"His greatest achievement was to hand operational independence to the Bank of England - at a stroke giving the financial markets confidence that the UK was serious about keeping inflation under control.
Another fine achievement - one for which he probably does not receive sufficient credit - was resisting the urgings of Tony Blair, his prime minister, for Britain to join the eurozone. It was also under Brown, who consistently borrowed more than he had previously forecast, that the progressive deterioration in the UK's public finances began.
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