Miliband's belated vow to do his fiscal homework

British elections are usually won by the party most trusted with the economy. Both of the men vying to be prime minister know what losing that trust feels like. The incumbent, David Cameron, was a Treasury adviser when the pound was bundled out of the exchange rate mechanism in 1992. Fifteen years later Ed Miliband , the current Labour leader, was a cabinet minister when Britain tumbled into a steep recession. In each case, the government's economic credibility, painstakingly built up over years, evaporated in a matter of weeks.

Any such sharp reversal in fortunes is unlikely to feature in this election. But the Tories' ill-focused start to the campaign has given their rivals an unlikely opening. The Labour manifesto, launched on Monday, featured front and centre a stout avowal of fiscal responsibility, full of pious statements about "securing our national finances" and balancing the books.

Such chutzpah would have been laughed out of court just a few months ago. Last autumn, Mr Miliband notoriously forgot to mention the deficit in a lamentable conference speech. Previously, his party spent the parliamentary term lambasting the coalition for its measured approach to cutting borrowing. Like his mentor Gordon Brown, the word "cuts" never passed Mr Miliband's lips except when aimed at a Conservative opponent.

The opportunity to attack Tory fiscal incontinence owes a little to Labour's growing maturity and more to the recent incoherence of the Tories. Late last year Mr Miliband finally acknowledged Britain's £90bn problem and deigned to provide the outlines of a solution. He took these baby-steps just as George Osborne, the chancellor, set out a fiscal plan so tight that it left him and his spokespeople silent on the details. Then, like Scrooge in the closing scenes of A Christmas Carol, the Conservatives reacted to a poor first week of campaigning by racing around with offers of unfunded generosity. On Sunday Mr Osborne declined 18 opportunities to explain where he would find an extra £8bn for the NHS. The next day Mr Miliband could, with a straight face, accuse the Tories of making the Green party look fiscally credible.

Attacking rather than exemplifying such indiscipline is meant to underpin the Tories' electoral offer of "competence not chaos". Having now thoroughly confused the public about their fiscal approach, they will need to find another avenue of attack.

The smaller print of Labour's manifesto provides ample opportunity. Its cure to every malaise is invariably more interference. Labour would wreck the truce that holds around the national minimum wage by dictating how it should rise. Railways, water companies, electricity firms and landlords would fall under the government's sway. Income tax would be charged at the rate of 10p, 20p, 40p or 50p in the pound. Labour would tinker with share voting rights and force companies to put a worker on remuneration boards. Already challenging targets for greenhouse gas reduction would become mandatory in law.

Perhaps a faint whiff of power in Labour party nostrils encouraged a late conversion to fiscal realism. Its ability to stick to a sensible plan remains fragile, under threat from grassroots support easily wooed by the fantasies of parties to its left. Mr Miliband's diagnosis of a country beset by low productivity may be acute, and perhaps his populist prods are mere gestures designed to placate this political base, later to be watered down. Unfortunately, the temptation to meddle is a more enduring feature of his political outlook than Gladstonian rigour.

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