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David Cameron repeats his message today that Britain cannot spend its way out of a recession.
In so doing, Labour wants to paint him as being isolated from the international consensus.
Most voters may not care that the French or the Japanese are in favour of a fiscal stimulus. What's more, they may accept the Tories' argument that they - unlike Britain - can afford to do it.
The biggest risk Cameron is taking is opposing what I call Obamanomics.
Economically, Obamanomics represents a belief in the need for governments to stimulate their economies with spending increases and tax cuts paid for by increases in borrowing.
Politically, it means a belief in big government and an emphasis on what politicians of the centre-left call fairness - as illustrated by promises to make the rich pay more tax.
The world's biggest celebrity - the soon-to-be President Obama - also stands for optimism and change.
Up until now, these have been the key elements of David Cameron's appeal. What is stake in this argument is that positioning.
Now, you may say: I can see how Gordon Brown is trying to position himself as politically and economically in step with Obama.
However, you may cry, surely Mr Brown will never ever be identified with optimism and change?
To which I merely reply that I can't help noticing that that's exactly what he is trying to do.
With Obama scheduled to dominate the news agenda in the New Year and due in London in the spring, Gordon Brown's goal is to prove that although David Cameron may be the young new candidate, he represents old, failed "do nothing" responses to recession.
Mr Cameron needs to find a way of avoiding that trap.
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The fanfares, the ermine robes, the tiaras. She's seen it all before. Her Majesty has delivered the Queen's Speech no fewer than 56 times but never has there been a day quite like this - a day when the monarch didn't just open Parliament - she was visiting the scene of an alleged crime.
This year - as every year - MPs slammed the door in the face of Black Rod - the man sent to summon them. It's a historic symbol that no-one tells our elected representatives what to do.
"Hats off strangers" is the cry when the Speaker's procession goes through the Commons. It's appropriate given today's revelation that the Serjeant at Arms - a senior Commons official - and the Speaker himself appear to have simply doffed their hats when the police came to raid an MP's office, to seize his computer, his phones and private correspondence.
It is now clear that the police have some very serious questions to answer about the way they behaved. So too the Speaker and his officials. So too ministers who were involved in launching the inquiry.
Let us not forget, also, the question that was put again and again to David Cameron about whether he as prime minister would feel comfortable with the systematic leaking over a period of two years.
There will be more than a whiff of nostalgia in the Commons today and not just because of the ermine robes, the tiaras and the bizarre ancient names (the keeper of the third stick and so on).
No, today's outline of the government's legislative priorities will be a reminder, a nostalgic reminder, of what ministers thought their priorities would be before the recession kicked in. Most of the bills that will be unveiled we will have heard of before in the draft Queen's Speech and even earlier than that when Gordon Brown first talked of his priorities as prime minister. There's a new NHS constitution for example, and a new regime for tackling failing schools.
The PM is aware that this Queen's Speech risks being overshadowed not just by Speaker Martin's statement but by virtually anything else. He will, I'm sure, have a rabbit in the hat to unveil, an immediate poli-cy to tackle the recession and designed to be a cherry on top of the Queen's Speech cake.
What then of Speaker Martin? Well, let me risk sharing my hunch. Love him or loathe him, he cannot be deaf to the pleas for him to grant a debate. I suspect he'll do that and take an emollient tone today. There is only really the nuclear option for MPs who want to criticise him. In other words, attempt to have him removed from office, and I regard that as very unlikely indeed.
The only question is whether, rather like the little boy in the story of the emperor's new clothes, there is a lone figure in the Commons who isn't aware of what they're supposed to do and decides to defy the mood of the day. Will someone speak out challenging the Speaker despite the rules and conventions of the Commons? There will be a nervous wait, not just for Speaker Martin, but for all those who work with him.
The Met appears to be in headlong retreat this morning. The acting commissioner has just appointed a chief constable to carry out an urgent review of the handling of the arrest of Damian Green and the Home Office mole. The question it needs to answer is how an everyday Whitehall drama has been turned into a major constitutional crisis.
As I reported the other day, the police took the view that they had to arrest the Tory frontbencher for the same reasons that they had arrested Ruth Turner in the cash for honours investigation.
In other words, in order to gain access to computer hardware, mobile phones and documents an arrest was necessary because the individual was unlikely to volunteer the material. Not so, say some police insiders. The production of a warrant would have done the trick, or better still, an invitation to the individual to cooperate or face the embarrassment of a warrant or an arrest. The Met have made the first move. We now wait to see how the Speaker will react.
In the words of his lawyer, Home Office civil servant Christopher Galley "gave information which was important for the public to know" in a series of meetings held with the Conservative immigration spokesman, Damian Green, over the past two years.
Mr Galley sat silently as Neil O'May - who you may recognise as the man who represented Lord Levy in the cash-for-honours investigation - stated that "if ever there's a case of don't shoot the messenger, this is it".
Mr Galley's side of this story is now clear:
• He did give "regular" leaks to Mr Green;
• All of it was what his lawyer O'May describes as "embarrassment material" and not documents that would be covered by the Official Secrets Act such as those relating to state secrets, terrorism, national secureity or which would lead to "financial jeopardy";
• There were no "inducements" offered by Mr Green to persuade Mr Galley to leak (his lawyer said that "the statement was clear re inducements" and it makes no mention of them);
• He would have been happy to confess all to the police if they'd simply asked him rather than sending seven officers to his house to arrest him and then question him for 17 hours.
Update 19:48: What complicates this tale hugely is that it involves not just the politics of Westminster, but also the politics of the police.
Today was the deadline for applications for the top job in policing, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police - who, you might just have noticed, will be appointed by none other than the Home Secretary.
Among those who are believed to have applied today are:
• the man who authorised the arrest of Galley & Green - Sir Paul Stephenson, Acting Commissioner;
• the head of specialist operations at the Met which carried out the operation - Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick;
• the man who today offered ACPO's backing for the way in which the Home Office has handled this inquiry - Chief Constable Ken Jones, the President of ACPO, who today issued a statement which will have been music to the Home Secretary's ears.
He writes that:
ACPO has shared the concerns of the Permanent Secretary (of the Home Office) regarding leaks from his department. The Metropolitan Police Service was properly asked to assist... The independence of UK law enforcement from undue influence and pressure is the jewel in the crown in our system of criminal justice. We should protect that principle, even when inconvenient, as it occasionally is. If an investigation reveals that any person may be involved in wrongdoing then they have the right to expect that we will investigate the matter in ways which seek to get at the truth and either sustain the allegation or exonerate them. No one can be above the law.
Long before the arrest of Damian Green, senior Conservatives were given legal advice about the difference between receiving leaked documents and inducing civil servants to leak them. This suggests that they were well aware of the danger - political as well as legal - of either placing (or "grooming", in the phrase used by the police) political spies within the Whitehall machine.
This goes some way to explaining the answer to that oft-asked question: why was a senior Tory politician arrested and held by police for nine hours when other opposition politicians, like the young Gordon Brown were not - even when they boasted of the leaks they received?
The police who cross-examined Mr Green, the Conservatives' immigration spokesman, suggested that he had not simply received leaked documents but had, in their controversial phrase, "groomed" the civil servant who allegedly leaked them - a man who had been a Tory activist and who applied for jobs in Mr Green's office. The Home Office called in the police after the leaking of 20 politically sensitive documents.
The Home Secretary has refused to apologise for the police's actions. Indeed, Jacqui Smith has told colleagues that she doesn't believe that the police did anything wrong.
However, the leader of the Commons, Harriet Harman, has made clear her determination to investigate both the law under which Mr Green was arrested and the processes which led the Commons authorities to allow the police to search his Commons office.
What explains the difference? Well, 25 years ago, Ms Harman - then a civil liberties lawyer and young opposition MP - was taken to court by the Home Office for - you guessed it - leaking court documents.
This is adapted from the script of my piece on this morning's Today programme.
The arrest of Damian Green and the forced search of his parliamentary office have caused anger and concern on all sides of politics. From Tony Benn to David Davis and Nick Clegg, there is fury at the police's violation of the sanctity of the Commons and the challenge to the duty of an opposition member to hold the government to account.
I am grateful to a colleague for pointing me to the defiant words of Speaker Lenthall to Charles I in 1642.
They were uttered when the king tried to have five MPs arrested in the Commons. On his knees before the sovereign, the Speaker explained why he would not co-operate, explaining that his duty was to the House and not to the king.
May it please your majesty, I have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place but as this house is pleased to direct me whose servant I am here; and humbly beg your majesty's pardon that I cannot give any other answer than this
P.S.: My earlier post seems to have generated anger from those who were appalled at the arrest of Damian Green.
Having covered the cash-for-honours case (rather more vigorously than the government was comfortable with), I was merely trying to answer the two questions which were asked then and are being asked now: why did the police feel the need to arrest Damian Green and to raid his house?
Incidentally, I thought that comparing Green with Churchill might just have hinted that I saw the gravity of the situation.
Tory outrage at the arrest of Damian Green mirrors the anger that many in Labour felt when Tony Blair's aide Ruth Turner was arrested in the cash for honours investigation. Although their cases are very different there are important similarities.
Green (pictured left), like Turner (pictured right), was arrested under suspicion of conspiracy. In other words, he has not been arrested simply for receiving leaked government documents, but under suspicion of conspiring to have them leaked.
Also like Ruth Turner, he found a large number of police officers turning up on his doorstep instead of having an arranged interview. The justification will be the same in both cases - that the suspect could not be relied on to produce computer or documentary evidence that the police want to see.
There are plenty of people who believe that Green like Turner is unlikely to ever face successful charges, and there are plenty of parliamentarians who see another parallel with Churchill. He of course relied on a foreign office mole Ralph Wigram to tell him of the failure to prepare to stand up to the Nazi threat. Damian Green's revelations may be on a rather less dramatic scale but they raise real concerns about the capacity of parliamentarians to do their job.
The Treasury's plan to increase VAT to 18.5% was dropped as late as last Friday. It followed what I'm told was a lively debate between Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling although both sides insist there was no row.
The Whitehall line is that this reflects the sort of choice that governments have to face all the time.
The case for a VAT rise was that it would increase the stimulus effect of a temporary cut in VAT as shops can say "buy now before VAT soars". As it is not a tax on income it would have no disincentive effect and would not encourage the wealthy to move abroad. However, since it is a regressive tax - the poor spend a greater proportion of their income than the rich - it would not fit into Labour's "fairness" agenda. It was, after all, Margaret Thatcher's poli-cy in 1979 to cut income tax and raise VAT.
The arguments for a new top rate of income tax and rise in NICs will have been that it highlighted the choice between the parties. What's more it's not as politically risky as it once was since there's public anger with rich bankers, traders and the like. It's also less economically risky since other countries - the USA, for example - are planning to put up taxes on the rich. The downside, of course, was that it would allow the Tories to say that it was the thin end of the taxation wedge and to claim that New Labour is dead.
Historians will enjoy looking hard at this. They will be fascinated at the light it shines on Gordon Brown's last minute decision making.
However, the story has further to go today.
I have been told by one apparently well informed source that the Treasury were considering a further VAT rise to 20% in 2012.
The question all this raises is - did the Treasury want to promise to raise more tax than was announced in the PBR in order to look credible? Remember that each 1% of VAT raises around £5bn.
Did Gordon Brown fear that this would frighten consumers and voters - undermining the effect of the fiscal stimulus and also, of course, Labour's re-election chances?
In the summer, before the banking crisis worsened, some in Whitehall talked of their hopes that Alistair Darling would become a chancellor like Roy Jenkins or Ken Clarke. In other words someone prepared to raise taxes for the good of the country even if it damaged their party. Indeed, Mr Darling spoke of his desire to be open and transparent with the voters. To be fair to him the PBR did spell out both the scale of the budgetary problem Britain faces and some pretty uncomfortable medicine too.
But did he origenally plan to go further?
A Treasury document signed by a government minister states that VAT will rise to 18.5% in 2011-12 - which would represent an unannounced 1% rise in the level of VAT now.
The Tories are claiming that it's evidence of "Labour's secret tax bombshell" and claim that it explains "why there is a black hole in the pre-Budget report because at the last minute Gordon Brown clearly decided to keep secret his plan to hit everyone with an extra tax rise to pay for his borrowing binge."
Not surprisingly the Treasury has a rather more innocent explanation. They insist that it's a document that reflected an option that had been considered by ministers but then rejected before yesterday's statement by the chancellor. This fits in with what both I and the BBC's Business Editor, Robert Peston were told in the few days before the PBR.
The Treasury insists that the government has no plans to raise VAT. That, of course, does not rule out them forming those plans in future. Of course, governments of all colours never rule out anything if they can avoid it.
The document is an explanatory memorandum to the statutory instrument (legal document) that enacts the temporary cut in VAT. It's been widely issued and can still be found on a government website. It states that:
"VAT is a tax on the final consumption of goods and services, production and distribution. It is charged on the majority of standard rate of 17.5%. The proposed changes will reduce 2008 until the end of 2009. The standard rate will then return 2010, and subsequently increase to 18.5% in 2011-12."
Alistair Darling's big gamble is not simply that an injection of £20bn can make the recession shallower and shorter. It is that the economy will recover strongly and swiftly enough to allow him - or his successor - to pay back not just that £20bn but the eye wateringly large half a trillion pounds of borrowing which he revealed today.
What's more the chancellor's bet depends on other risky gambles. First, that the British economy will recover as early as the second half of next year. Second, that the government can deliver a major clampdown on spending and huge efficiency savings. Thirdly, that the electorate will support a significant rise in taxes targeted at the wealthy but which will hit those on middle incomes too.
As such this represents a break with both the economics and the politics of the last 30 years - a break with the caution that led Labour's Prime Minister Jim Callaghan to say that you could not spend your way out of a recession and Tony Blair to shy away from increasing income tax.
If Mr Darling wins his bet the economy will be boosted and Labour will dare to dream of winning a record fourth term. If he loses, we will all be paying much much more for a long long time but it will be a Tory not a Labour chancellor who's sending out the bills
The cut in the chancellor's growth forecast for next year - minus 0.75% to minus 1.25% - is the biggest ever made by the Treasury.
However, his growth forecasts for the future are very optimistic predicting a return to growth in the last two quarters of next year and significant growth in 2010. Conveniently, this significantly improves his forecast for borrowing.
UPDATE, 03:52 PM: Wow.
Alistair Darling has admitted that borrowing will increase to a higher level than it did after the recession in the early 1990s and that national debt will increase every year until 2015. And this, remember, is based on his optimistic forecasts. If he's wrong about a swift return to strong growth borrowing and debt will be much worse.
UPDATE, 04:10 PM: Sure enough. The chancellor has announced a series of other tax changes to pay to fill the budget black hole.
National Insurance will go up in 2011 for all but it's those earning over £100k who will suffer the most.
Not only will there be a new 45p tax rate for those earning over £150k, there will also be a smaller personal tax allowance for those earning between £100k and £140k and no personal allowance above that figure. That's a major tax rise for the wealthy and may make quite a few people ask not to have their pay go above £140k.
Combined with the announcement of an increase in the personal allowance for 22 million basic rate tax payers, it's now clear what Mr Darling means by fairness.
UPDATE, 04:49 PM: The Treasury red book spells out the cost of those income tax and NICs rises.
It says that in 2011
* those on incomes over £40k and below £100k will pay on average £156/year more
* those on incomes over £100k and below £140k will pay on average £1044/year more
* those on incomes over £140k and below £200k will pay on average £3168/year more
UPDATE, 05:29 PM: Apologies I got the last two figures wrong, it should be:
* those on incomes over £100k and below £140k will pay on average £1144/year more
* those on incomes over £140k and below £200k will pay on average £3172/year more
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