It was a moment to savour for Gordski and his faithful band of Bolsheviks. The comrade Chancellor had, so we thought, just about finished his valedictory Budget with the usual bellowing declaration: "This is a Budget for Britain's families."(Cheer). "This is a Budget for fairness." (Bigger cheer). "This is a Budget for the future." (Even bigger cheer). Then came the killer moment. To Labour laughter, there was a heavily pregnant pause. "And I have one further announcement."

The comrades oohed and aahed in anticipation. The bourgeois Conservatives looked on in silent bemusement. Gordski milked the moment. Then, in a ruthless blow worthy of Uncle Joe Stalin himself, the Scot delivered his coup de theatre - a 2p cut in income tax.

The comrades could barely contain themselves and whooped uproariously, waving their order papers above their cheering heads.

Button-eyed George Osborne's jaw hit the Commons floor, while David Cameron bit his lip and smiled a smile filled with a very large expletive. The shellshocked Tory MPs behind them looked as if they had just seen the Speaker disrobe and streak, skipping daintily, through the springtime chamber.

Truth be told, no-one was expecting it. It was not so much a rabbit Gordski had whipped out of his hat but a rather large and overstuffed March hare. In a moment of political lunacy, the Tory back benchers sought to match the volume of their Labour opponents by hooting at Mr Cameron's assertion the dastardly Mr Brown had in fact nicked their key economic policy.

"Yes," declared Mr Cameron, sporting a strange windswept look to disguise his thinning hair, "you can share the proceeds of growth." Cue Conservative cheers.

Aha, they thought, gotcha. But hold on a minute. The Chancellor and PM-in-waiting had just pulled the rug from beneath the Tories and yet they were cheering. Tablets and a darkened room beckoned surely?

Earlier, Lord Turnbull's Stalinist quip had given MPs material to work on, not least for Mr Cameron and Gordski himself.

At PMQs, the Tory leader noticed John Reid - the famous former Commie - smiling and noted: "I don't know why the Home Secretary's smiling, he'll soon be running a power station in Siberia." Even the hardened Glaswegian chuckled.

After a second planted question about Scotland, to which Tony Blair could again defend the Union and say how horrible those nasty Nats were, Tory back bencher James Brokenshire could not resist taking a swipe at Gordski by asking the PM: "Is Lord Turnbull right or isn't the Prime Minister bovvered?"

As the Tories enjoyed the reference to Mr Blair's Red Nose Day take-off of Catherine Tate's dysfunctional teenager, the PM replied: "Fortunately, one of the things I've not had to be bothered about in the last 10 years is the running of the economy because he (GB) has done such a good job."

Gordski, brushing down his hair, tilted his head and smiled with a deal of embarrassment as the comrades nodded approvingly.

For his own part, the Chancellor later played the Stalinist comparison well in his Budget speech, ie he joked at his own expense.

Expressing thanks for their "hard work and on occasion their forthright advice, the civil servants, should I say the comrades, that I have worked with in Budgets present and past".

The economic statement took on the usual flow, with Gordski running through the past years and how brilliant a Chancellor he had been, moving understandably slowly over the good bits like high public investment and lower inflation, and quickly over the bad ones such as the higher-than-expected Budget deficit and increased forecasts for future public borrowing. Without looking at Alex Salmond, Mr Brown dwelt on one statistic, which will be used repeatedly in the forthcoming Holyrood campaign, given that it is what the SNP is predicating a lot of its economic policies on: North Sea oil revenue.

Gordski said there had been only one major change in the balance of the books between now and 2011: the drop-off in oil tax revenue, from £13bn to £8bn this year, with an average yearly cut of £4bn. Mr Salmond, busy taking notes as the Chancellor spoke, broke out in one of his famous Cheshire Cat grins.

After the Chancellor gave his farewell Budget and received a hearty pat on the back from TB, Mr Cameron stood up at the dispatch box to respond in what is arguably the Leader of the Opposition's toughest parliamentary task. His troops are always loyally willing him on, belly-laughing at the most dreadful of jokes and cheering heartily at the weakest effort of political point-scoring.

While Mr Brown, as is usual on these occasions, attempted to ignore the Tory leader by speaking to his Downing Street neighbour, Mr Cameron offered the rapier-like quip: "The Prime Minister and the Chancellor are having their annual conversation."

Denouncing Gordski for his "spin and distortion", Dave dismissed the Labour comrades as "monkeys" - and got away with it. In the end, he resorted to political bluster, declaring to the cheering Labour MPs: "It is a bit like Stalin: they're cheering him on now and he'll wipe them out later." It was time for the Tories to chuckle at the prospect of the great Stalinist purge to come.

But it was Gordski's day. If clapping were a custom in the Commons, then the comrades would have applauded in serried unison out of gratitude to "the gardener of human happiness" and "the brilliant genius of humanity" as Uncle Joe used to be dubbed. The cult of personality is about to be upon us once the Chancellor transmogrifies into the nation's glorious leader.

Of course, Comrade Number One, in seeking to upend the Tories and the Nationalists with his Budget, had one eye on the opinion polls, which put the former ahead south of the border and the latter ahead north of it. Time will tell whether Gordski's "cash for votes" strategy will pay off.