BUDGETS are prone to turning, like milk in the July heat.

It is the oddest thing, and it can be over the slightest item. George Osborne thought his Budget of 2012 was hot stuff, for example, only to see it crumble into disrepute due to the pasty tax.

But one does not get to be First Secretary of State without a certain self-confidence, and so it is that the Chancellor was to be found yesterday proudly standing his ground on this week's Summer Budget. That is the Bullingdon, sorry, bulldog, spirit for you.

Judging by his interview on the Today programme, Mr Osborne's confidence had, if anything, grown overnight. Far from being on the defensive over a statement that gave with one hand and took with the other, the Chancellor came out with his dukes up.

What he was offering, he said, was "a new contract" with the country. "What we're saying to businesses is pay higher wages but you get lower taxes. What we're saying to people is you get a bigger pay cheque but there will be a less generous benefits system. What we're saying to the country is we're going to spend less but we're going to live within our means. And that is the new settlement. I think it's the new centre of British politics."

New settlement. New centre. New contract. One might wonder why he did not go the whole Blairite way and rebrand his party The New Tories. It was Mr Osborne's boss who once called himself the "heir to Blair", but should that title now go to the Chancellor instead? After all, between his version of the minimum wage, and pinching the clothes of Labour and the SNP over non-doms, the pace of deficit reduction, and cuts in corporation tax, this Conservative Chancellor is now politically cross-dressing to such an extent he makes Eddie Izzard look positively dowdy.

It came as zero surprise that opposition parties and charities helping the poor should have attacked Mr Osborne's welfare cuts as savage and likely to cause the already hard-pressed more suffering. In days to come, as the numbers are crunched in households up and down the UK, one can expect more stories of those who thought they were on the winning side of the Budget, only to find themselves out of pocket. Playing Osborne Charades - is it a film, a play, a genuine gain or a con trick? - will be a parlour game that the whole family does not want to play, but must. The Institute for Fiscal Studies was first out of the traps yesterday, estimating 13 million families were set to be worse off as a result of the Chancellor's efforts on Wednesday.

More unexpected than the attack on the welfare dependent was the way Mr Osborne went after those who might be thought of as the kind of constituencies a chap would want to court if he had ambitions to one day lead the Conservative Party. Not all employers are happy with the Living Wage move, which will cost some £4 billion to implement. Changes to the dividend tax system, a profits tax on banks, an apprenticeship levy, tightening the rules for non-doms, ending some of the perks enjoyed by buy-to-let landlords - what would Mrs Thatcher have made of all of this? She would certainly have approved of increasing the inheritance tax threshold to a cool million, the welfare cuts and the public sector pay cap, but the rest of it was the kind of meddling in the free market she could not abide. Mr Osborne banked £47bn from tax rises, while the savings on welfare brought in £35bn. In the Thatcher era, Tory backbenchers would have been baying for far more of the latter and less of the former. But the UK plc of today is a long way from Mrs Thatcher's Britain, and a Tory Chancellor must adapt and thrive accordingly.

Mr Osborne is not the heir to Blair, nor would he wish to be seen as such. No politician would. Heir to Blair? Might as well dub oneself the scion to halitosis. It should be noted that Mr Cameron used the heir-to-Blair phrase in 2005 when he was running for the Tory leadership. He later said he regretted using it, and had only done so in the context of his desire to modernise the party. Had it not been for Iraq, being an heir to Mr Blair might well have been a way for a politician to associate themselves with winning elections, reforming the public sector, finding a third way between right and left, and many another pursuit. But there was Iraq and that, for Mr Blair's reputation, has been that.

Mr Blair, in any case, was a weak heir to Bill Clinton, who in turn was a pale version of JFK. Few politicians come off well in the comparison game. Who went first will always seem better, bolder, shinier. Instead of imitating another, Mr Osborne has chosen to work with what he has and simply reinvent himself. It is not just the fripperies such as the weight loss and the new haircut. It is the way he has fashioned and positioned himself as the man who can win the centre ground of English politics for the Tories, who can change not just the fiscal landscape but the political geography of the UK.

One might wonder where Scotland stands in Mr Osborne's heart. His most obvious contribution to the fight to save the Union, you will recall, was to venture north to tell Scots they had another think coming if they thought they could have the pound in an independent Scotland. As if in some grotesque Mexican wave, the backs of an entire nation went up, one after another. When Mr Osborne speaks of "Northern powerhouses" (something which irritates the clogs off Labour MPs, and he knows it) it is Manchester he is dreaming of, not Aberdeen. All of which plays well with the Tory troops in these post-referendum days. If Mr Osborne has any love for Scotland it is of the tough kind, as displayed when, in a rare mention of the country during his Budget, he told the Scottish Government, now that extra powers were coming its way, to put up or shut up.

Mr Osborne had a good Budget in as much as he got the headlines he wanted. In doing so, it has been argued, he has put a hefty down payment on the leadership. Yet even he, supremely confident today, must wonder if that luck will hold. It is a long way till 2020. Chat-show chumps can be taken seriously enough to become mayors, then MPs, then ministers, then prime ministers. A lot can happen in Scotland, the UK, Europe, and the rest of the world. Much can occur even in the short distance between Numbers 10 and 11 Downing Street, between a prime minister saying he will go before his term is officially up, and eventually doing so. It would be rich indeed if instead of the heir to Blair, this most clever of Chancellors ended up the heritor to Brown.