Some time today we will have a new Chancellor. If it is not Alistair Darling it will be tempting to conclude that he has turned down the job.

You can see why - and why whoever accepts it must do so with some trepidation. The problem is the new Prime Minister.

Gordon has not been parading his ten-year "legacy" these last weeks like Tony Blair. But don't expect him to sit back and say "It's your job now", watching his own appointed successor dismantle large chunks of it.

On the grand scale of things he can claim to have been a singularly successful Chancellor.

He has presided over ten years of prosperity unbroken by a recession - uninterrupted by the Russian implosion, the Asian banking crisis, 9/11 and the wars that followed and the trebling of the price of oil. Finally, he has got out before it all turns to ashes.

Yet away from the great sweep of history, large chunks of Gordon's legacy seriously need dismantling.

His devil is his detail, his obsessive love of complication that has multiplied the physical size of Tolley's tax guide.

One project Kenneth Clarke left behind in 1997 was an undertaking to translate the accumulated tax law into plain English.

Nobody would attempt that now. It is too big a job to contemplate.

Complication has been the source of Gordon's most blatant failures - above all the appalling nonsense of over-paying tax credits to people who used to be on what was called income support, then claiming it back as if it were over-due tax owed by self-employed people in a tangle with their tax returns.

Business people now rank "red tape" as the biggest blight on their prospects - alongside skill shortages.

He did set up a "Better Regulation Commission" four years ago. For all we know things could have been even worse without it.

What we needed, though, was a "Less Regulation Commission".

Appointing a "Business Leaders Council" now - even one headed, improbably, by Permira's Damon Buffini - is good for a headline this morning. But meeting two or three times a year it can never keep a Brown Government on the straight and narrow.

Above all, as Gordon finally admitted last week he has taxed us more than we were taxed in the dark days when Ken Clarke was paying off Government debt run up in the recession of the early nineties.

He has been a tax-and-spend Chancellor - not always a wise spender - who has now had to call a halt to the spending.

One prickly legacy he left behind in the Treasury is a virtually complete Comprehensive Spending Review.

Is it conceivable that he will allow the new Chancellor to meddle with it? Yet if he doesn't meddle his hands are tied for three years.

Gordon is not going to be a hands-off Prime Minister like Tony Blair.

He will never let another Chancellor have the power of virtual veto he himself exercised these past ten years.

He reminded us in his Budget speech that Mr Gladstone doubled as Chancellor and PM for a spell. That may turn out to be a precedent.