Mr Brown, Mr Balls and the elusive Mrs Mortgage

To the mandarins of the Treasury it seemed a bizarre request. Could all notes to the Chancellor of the Exchequer please include home telephone numbers. The Chancellor likes to read papers between 6am and 7.30am, his office explained, before coming into the department. He needs to be able to get to any official while they're digesting their morning toast.

Over the past two weeks, Brown and his tight entourage of staff have been in what officials describe as 'Budget blitz' mode. From 6am Brown is on the telephone. With his two special advisers, Ed Balls and Ed Miliband, he has been worrying away, grinding the figures, totting up the advantages and disadvantages of a tweak here, a tweak there.

How will the latest details on increasing maternity pay work? How will widening the 10p tax band be made to look like a tax cut for everybody? How much will a family on average earnings of £25,000 be better off if all the tax and benefit changes kick in on 5 April? About £370, Gordon, came the reply.

It is a punishing schedule. At 7.30am his car arrives for the short journey from the Westminster home he shares with wife Sarah Macaulay to the Treasury. There he continues his machinations, banging out his thoughts on a laptop in large block capitals, all the more easy to read for a man with poor eyesight.

Sometimes his secretary brings in a projector. Brown's laptop thoughts are beamed onto a screen so that Balls and Miliband can see what he is writing, his Budget speech the centre of attention. No one else is in the room, a smaller, more private study off the original cavernous office Brown first occupied.

They bash phrases backwards and forwards - what will tickle the party, what will tickle the nation? - the loyalty of his two trusted lieutenants unquestioned. Not for Brown the process established by his predecessors. It is not officials who draft the Budget speech but the Chancellor himself.

Balls is the chief economic adviser to the Treasury. He is the channel through which every minute passes, and he has succeeded in outmanoeuvring the civil servants to ensure that his master's will is done. Brown and Balls hate endless memos. They keep their thoughts in their heads and in Brown's computer. It's safer that way. Not for nothing is Balls nicknamed the deputy chancellor.

The other Ed is the brother of David Miliband, head of the Downing Street policy unit. But even the family link is not enough to allow No 10 a peek at Brown's detailed thinking. The Chancellor ensures that the Prime Minister is kept up with the broad themes, but the details are under wraps until the last minute. Other members of the Cabinet are not told about their specific areas of spending until a few days before the big day.

The Cabinet as a whole will have to wait until Wednesday morning to hear about the Budget speech. They received a note last month from Downing Street saying Blair had moved the weekly Cabinet meeting forward to next Wednesday morning so that Brown could tell them what was going on. Five hours later Brown will get up in the House of Commons, pile up a set of books so that he can rest his speech high enough for him to see it and tell the nation what he is up to.

The Chancellor is not a man for formal meetings. Recent relations between the Chancellor's and Prime Minister's teams have improved, but the tension remains. Brown sees the Treasury as the natural headquarters of economic and social policy. Blair wants to concentrate power in No 10, the Policy Unit and the Cabinet Secretariat. The Treasury - tight-knit, secretive, ferociously intelligent - is winning the battle.

Thanks to a series of judiciously timed leaks, it is now becoming clear where Brown's priorities lie. Women, the voters Labour fears are most disillusioned with Tony Blair the politician and New Labour the Government, are to be wooed like never before.

Maternity pay will be boosted, rules on how many tax benefits new parents can claim will be relaxed, benefits for families with children will be increased. And the new Labour worry, Mrs Mortgage, will be told that interest rates and mortgage repayments are at their lowest for years. Everything, from a reduction in stamp duty for new homes in deprived areas to boosts for single parents, will be given a family-friendly edge.

It has all been planned with meticulous care. In 1998 Brown started plotting the route to the next election, fixed already in his mind as May 2001. Each year the Budget has had slightly more to give away, culminating in the Treasury's 'red-letter day', 5 April 2001.

On that day, in a month's time, a series of tax and benefit changes will kick in. Pensions will increase, rules on how much money the elderly can save before they have to pay for their own care will be relaxed, child benefit will increase, road tax will be cut for millions of cars, tax credits aimed at those earning under £40,000 will be launched.

Poorer families will be up to £2,600 a year better off. Tax cuts through the increase in the 10p income tax band will mean everyone has a little more in their pocket. An election will be called. Blair will win. Brown will be the man behind it. Perfect.

The procession of high-heels clicking across the varnished floorboards upstairs at No 11 Downing Street shortly after the last two Budgets were the first sign. Over the white wine and canapés, Brown struggled manfully to make small talk with magazine editors anxious to know where he bought his suits.

Sarah Macaulay circled among guests ranging from female MPs and journalists to prominent women such as Germaine Greer and even Cherie Booth.

But as with everything Brown does, there was a carefully calculated point to it all - to show that the Chancellor sympathised with women.

It underlined a message the Budgets had already made clear with promises of massive increases in childcare places, tax breaks for working women to pay for those childcare places, even the scrapping of VAT on sanitary products last year, a matter so embarrassing to the Chancellor that he failed to mention it in his speech and left it to a junior Minister to brief journalists afterwards.

Labour campaign strategists have identified Mrs Mortgage as the woman they have to woo. Middle England, middle income, hard-working, she will be the target of the election campaign. She was picked after research revealed that it was women who were least impressed with the Government's multi-billion pound economic arguments and felt that Labour had failed to be as modernising at it had claimed it would be.

The Chancellor has taken this on board, despite his predominantly male core of advisers. Helping him to win Mrs Mortgage's trust are Harriet Harman, an old Brown ally and former Minister, Maeve Sherlock, the former head of the National Council of One Parent Families, and Treasury ministers Dawn Primarolo and Melanie Johnson.

Primarolo and Johnson have linked up with the two Women's Ministers, Tessa Jowell and Margaret Jay. It was Primarolo, once a struggling single mother herself, who fought for the children's tax credit to be drawn by mothers as well as fathers, following fears that in some households it would never be spent on the children.

But there have been some hiccups for Brown. This week's announcement on maternity pay follows intense haggling between his officials and the women's lobby: the Chancellor favoured targeting help on poor new mothers, arguing that wealthy women earning large salaries did not need the state to top up their bank balances when they gave birth. But he has relented and will announce on Wednesday that the state will provide maternity pay for all, with a likely top-up for those most in need through extra tax credits.

Brown is acutely aware that Labour's election hopes will be heavily dependent on his performance in the House of Commons on Wednesday. Party officials know that if the public are not convinced, then the chances of another huge majority could suffer, even though some opinion polls are already predicting such an outcome on 3 May, which is still the favoured date for a poll.

Other reports:
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Don't scare the horses in the City
Giving credit where tax credit's due
Now, will the real Gordon Brown please stand up?
When prudence turns dangerous
Gordon's tonic: the hot tips
Is Labour aiming at you?
More cash and time off for mothers
Mr Brown, Mr Balls and the elusive Mrs Mortgage