Britain is heading for an economic hard landing because Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr Gordon Brown, has been conducting policy with "singular incompetence" almost from the day Labour won office, Mr Brown's Conservative predecessor, Mr Kenneth Clarke, said yesterday. The boom would come to "a very sticky end shortly". Mr Clarke predicted that "politics will become serious when unemployment starts rising at the end of the year".

He said: "I remain ever more convinced that we are heading for a very hard bump. I sense out there that this mood is spreading very rapidly indeed as people realise what Gordon Brown has done."

Accusing Mr Brown of raising taxes on the wrong people, fiddling the public spending figures and planning a spending spree, Mr Clarke criticised the chancellor for giving power over interest rates to an expert committee at the Bank of England which had also got it wrong.

"We're miles away from the `loadsamoney' atmosphere of the late 1980s which is what Gordon keeps invoking," he told a press briefing at Westminster, just after the bank's monetary policy committee had decided not to raise interest rates above the current 7.5 per cent.

The committee was appointed after Mr Brown freed the bank from Treasury control last year.