It is time for the world to get curious about Gordon Brown. Britain's ambitious chancellor of the exchequer this week bucked more than 20 years of international political orthodoxy by openly raising taxes in his Budget in order to finance a 43 per cent increase in health spending in real terms by 2008.

He admitted he was gambling on middle-income voters' willingness to swallow his £8.3bn ($12bn) rise in annual taxes, but was applauded by members of his ruling Labour party. If the gamble pays off, his already substantial chance of succeeding Tony Blair as prime minister will be enhanced. That could happen after the next election, expected in 2005.

But what kind of politician is he? Mr Brown is an unlikely candidate to revive single-handedly the politics of tax and spend that many thought had been buried for good in the privatising, tax-averse wave of liberal economics that swept the world after 1980.

Mr Brown, even more than Mr Blair, was the intellectual force behind the creation of New Labour in the early 1990s after four successive election defeats. It rejected many tenets of postwar social democracy, embraced enterprise, and swapped Keynesian demand management for monetary and fiscal discipline.

It also pledged not to raise the basic and higher rates of income tax - a promise Mr Brown appears to have broken, at least in spirit. His main tax increase was an extra percentage point on national insurance contributions, a remnant of a state-run social insurance system that is levied on earnings. It differed from an income tax rise only in not hitting savers and pensioners.

Furthermore, Mr Brown severely dented his pro-business credentials by imposing the same increase in employers' contributions. When higher corporate taxes on North Sea oil companies, foreign-owned banks and television companies were added in, business found to its fury that it was paying three-quarters of the chancellor's tax increases.

It all adds to the fog surrounding the philosophy of a political movement that has always been hard to define. While Mr Blair travels the world making common cause with rightwing leaders such as George W. Bush and Silvio Berlusconi on issues from terrorism to labour market reform, Mr Brown - with Mr Blair's agreement - is raising taxes to fund the expansion of a 1940s-style state health system.

The immediate explanation lies in the British people's deep attachment to the National Health Service, a quasi-monopoly provider that is popular despite its waiting lists, doctor shortages and antiquated facilities. Mr Blair promised two years ago to raise NHS spending to the European Union average. Ever since, Mr Brown has been working out how to pay for it.

But this week's Budget signals more than an adjustment to realpolitik. Mr Brown is not a man to be blown about by mere events. In Labour's first term, his moves to get people off welfare and into work provided its core policies. Once he realised that investment in health must dominate its second term, he set about it with determination, planning its needs for 20 years ahead.

It underlines the paradox about Mr Brown: he somehow contrives to be quintessentially New Labour and Old Labour at the same time. He has deeper roots in the Labour party than Mr Blair. Centre-left Labour MPs who have become restive with Mr Blair's stance on issues from potential military action in Iraq to private-sector involvement in delivering public services are looking to Mr Brown as the prime minister's likely successor.

They waved and cheered after the chancellor's Budget statement - a "phenomenal" investment in health that would raise the party's spirits, said Gordon Prentice, leftwing MP for Pendle; "breathtaking in its scope and vision", said Ken Purchase, MP for Wolverhampton North East.

Mr Brown, the son of a Scottish Presbyterian rector, was imbued as a young man with the party's socialist traditions, attempting to revive the passions of Red Clydeside as late as the 1970s. His childhood home was surrounded by the mining villages of Fife, where he saw poverty and unfulfilled talent - references to which still pepper his speeches.

As chancellor, he has done more to redistribute income from the rich to the poor than many anticipated. This week's Budget introduced a children's tax credit and a working tax credit designed to top up the incomes of families and the working poor. The effect is that the bottom 40 per cent are net gainers, while the top 60 per cent of earners face losses of escalating size.

But for Mr Brown to be held up by backbenchers as a leftwing hero is a travesty of the events of the past five years. Mr Brown and the Treasury have been responsible for the policies the left most dislikes.

These include sticking to the Conservatives' spending plans for the first two years' after 1997; a cutback in welfare benefits for lone parents; a sharp increase in fuel duty; a 75p a week increase in state pensions; part-privatisation of air traffic control and the London Underground; and the private finance initiative in health and other public services.

Mr Brown told the Financial Times last month that he wanted to send a "strong message that the wealth-creating agenda and support for public-private partnerships, the encouragement of small business is central to everything we as a government will do. Those people who are suggesting we move backwards from that agenda are not in my view expressing the sentiments the Labour party wants to support - that we have got to combine enterprise and fairness".

Mr Brown's tax rises this week were only possible, as the chancellor is quick to point out, because of the fiscal and monetary disciplines he imposed in 1997, when he gave the Bank of England independent control over interest rates, backed by a symmetrical inflation target.

The Budget was not a complete break with previous policies. Mr Brown had previously increased taxes by stealth; now he is doing so openly. But the projected rise in the tax burden over the next five years is less than over the last five, and will still be lower than in France, Italy and Germany. Mr Brown remains a chancellor who looks to the US for a pro-enterprise model, and lectures European finance ministers on the need for economic reform.

What kind of prime minister he would be is less certain. He is the ultimate social engineer, using financial power to pull the levers of almost every aspect of policy - one to expand public services, another to promote competition, another to combat child poverty. It is a difficult strategy to translate to the touchy-feely world of international statesmanship, though he tries hard to do so on issues such as debt relief.

Would this driven intellectual have the personal skills to roam the world, as Mr Blair has done, drumming up support for US-led military action against terrorism after September 11? If it came to an assault on Iraq, would he even want to? Mr Brown has remained largely silent on Mr Blair's military ventures from Kosovo onwards. For all his Atlanticism, it is hard to see him showing such warmth to a Republican president as Mr Blair did with Mr Bush in Crawford, Texas.

The odds are that he will get his chance to try, though as Lord Jenkins of Hillhead, a former Labour chancellor, once said, history suggests that politicians who take on the top job after their party has been a long time in power face "almost a guarantee of mortification". Just ask Margaret Thatcher's successor, John Major.

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