Chancellors used to surprise us. Gordon Brown prefers to overwhelm us. This was a Budget for families and pensioners, for motorists and inner-city entrepreneurs . . . and one for expectant fathers and punters, beer-drinkers and headmasters, museum-goers and film-makers . A Budget for almost everyone, really, who has a vote on May 3. Mr Brown's hand must have sorely ached from writing all those cheques. The farmers alone, it seemed, were disappointed. But then Mr Brown has never bonded with rural Britain.

There was a strategy too in this Budget - one that defines the chancellor's ambitions for a second Labour term. It was about work and poverty, public investment and productivity. But we are a matter of weeks away from the general election. So the confetti grabbed the attention.

As a piece of theatre this was a disappointing performance. The rhetoric was about as exciting as the weather forecast. If the government has a new initiative, whether a drug programme or paid paternity leave, Mr Brown must be the one to announce it. The chancellor needs a good sub-editor.

The politics, though, were smart. Voters do not watch the Budget speech. It is the headlines that count. The chancellor gave the media plenty to choose from. It is a tautology to say that Mr Brown delivered a political Budget. Everything this chancellor does is political. He knows nothing else. But the tactics for the general election are now clear.

I find it hard to imagine that this package will send the disillusioned and disenchanted flocking back to Labour. Many of those cheques, after all, are pretty small, and more than a few are post-dated. But the government's lead in the opinion polls is already unprecedented. Mr Brown has further narrowed the Conservatives' field of fire.

William Hague's response in the House of Commons encapsulated his party's dilemma. Mr Hague cracked some good jokes. He always does. And he lambasted the government for the stealth taxes in the early years of the parliament that now allow Mr Brown to put some money back in the voters' pockets. But my guess is that the electorate will be unmoved by the opposition's attempts to make a scandal out of the Treasury's abolition of dividend tax credits.

More immediately, what in this package can Conservative candidates condemn when they are out on the doorsteps asking for votes? What precisely would they take back - the cash for schools, the money for extra nurses, the two weeks' paid paternity leave, the tax breaks for inner-city regeneration?

Here Mr Brown's extra money for schools and hospitals sharpens Mr Hague's dilemma. The Conservative leader had said he would match Labour's spending in these areas. So the chancellor upped the ante. Over the next three years health and education will get another £1bn apiece - on top of the massive increases in resources announced after last year's spending review. How can the opposition keep promising deeper tax cuts without cutting back on these crucial spending programmes? Its pledges to recoup billions from waste and fraud already look beyond the limits of credibility.

Mr Brown's decision to concentrate a modest reduction in income tax on the low-paid is equally hard to quarrel with. Everyone these days chases the votes of "hard-working" families. A few years ago, the opposition might have had an answer. Instead of new tax credits, wider 10p rate bands and the rest, the Conservatives might have offered straightforward cuts in the basic rate of income tax: a penny or even twopence off would have been Margaret Thatcher's riposte. But Mr Brown has driven Mr Hague off that strategy. It is hard to imagine that the voters will be as excited by the opposition's pledge to cut another few pence off petrol duty.

There are risks in all this for Mr Brown. Public spending over the next few years is now projected to rise by 3.7 per cent a year in real terms. The increases for health and education are more than double that.

In Mr Brown's mind this represents a large but calculated step change in the levels of public investment designed to reverse the historic underinvestment in the nation's infrastructure. He is careful not to project these sort of figures into an indefinite future. But, for all the extraordinary health of the public finances, the chancellor's plans are at the outer limit of what he can reasonably define as prudent.

Such concerns, though, lie beyond the election. For now Mr Brown looks set to reap the rewards of his earlier hard choices. Far more important than anything in the Budget at the coming election will be the perception among voters that Labour has by and large kept to its promise to manage the economy well.

For the first time in its history, the party of the centre-left has synchronised the politics and the economics. And in his reforms of the welfare state, the promise of sustained investment in health and education and the concentration of benefits on poor families and pensioners, Mr Brown has defined the social purpose. There is such a thing as society, even in a market economy.

There has been a fair degree of luck in this. Labour's economic inheritance from the Conservatives was far better than it has ever admitted. And, until the recent downturn on the other side of the Atlantic, the inter-national economic environment has been extraordinarily benign. There has also been chicanery - yes, the tax burden has risen under Labour. The absence of candour is a pity because Mr Brown would do better with the electorate by keeping it straight.

But all those favourable indicators - the lowest inflation, interest rates, unemployment for a generation - are a repayment, too, for serious judgment. Perhaps we should not begrudge Mr Brown the small pleasure of writing all those cheques.