It’s not often that my colleague and friend Oliver Dean steals my editorial from under my nose, but this Budget day he rather let the cat out of the bag.
Of course it wasn’t wrong, to say yesterday:
“Tomorrow is the Budget. Ergo, one must write about the Budget today, tomorrow and the day after. It’s a rather boring ordeal. Every right-of-centre commentator will spew the same lines, arguing that tax hikes are bad, welfare should be reined in and defence should be funded properly.”
It’s just inconvenient. Never reveal how the sausage is made Oliver my lad.
However, given that message discipline inside the Treasury, and the Healey team has been, as it should be, very tight lipped and has successfully limited pre-Budget leaks – both inadvertent and deliberate, the latter being a Reeves staple – and given the Number 10 comms crowd have almost reached ‘gyroscopic stability’ they’re spinning so hard on how “steady as she goes, no surprises, continuity” today’s Budget will be, it’s quite hard to take you behind the scenes, and ‘under the hood’ of this Budget, this morning.
Here’s what we do know – or think we know. It’s a ‘sticky pickle’ of a Budget.
The condiments crowd will cheer, but I’m not sure who had cheaper marmalade and gherkins on their pre-budget bingo card. As wise heads pointed out if you are going to make the condiments cheaper, and you want a cheer from the public, perhaps adapt the same logic to all foodstuffs?
Energy costs are at the root of the cost of living crisis, and the papers this morning talk of plans to scrap standing charges on energy bills which might cut bills by between £22-50 a year. A year. That should cover your annual marmalade consumption.
Every Lidl helps.
The stuff that might matter, measures that could actually tackle the big economic challenges this country currently faces no matter who is in charge, will not be entering stage left – properly left these days – or if they do, like an archaeologist searching for foundations of something big, economic commentators will be sifting through the “red book” for signs and nuggets that the Chancellor and Treasury have buried in its recesses.
Which does allow me to take you behind the scenes of a Budget, just not this one. Instructive though, I think.
I’d timed it. I’d even done a run through and scoped the route.
I was pretty certain I could do it in six minutes, but I had to factor in bulk and added weight which in all my run throughs I had not actually had.
This was Budget Day somewhere in the late naughties, a Tory friend was urging me to try and work into my BBC report the line:
“All the thieves are Brown and the sky is grey…” except for the frustrating fact that there would be no BBC report from me. My staring role would be taking a very fast walk “on a winter’s day.” Let me explain.
In this political period, despite being based in Milbank right next to Parliament and broadcasting almost every day on the latest political developments, the BBC in it’s weird wisdom of the time, decided it’s political teams were not required for the Budget.
It’s called ‘big footing’. Send in your big beasts, which ironically in those days meant Andrew Neil stepping out of our studio – I will never understand why – and sending in a Dimbleby or Huw Edwards. Yeah, I hear you.
All the people who day in day out gauged and interpreted the ebbs and flows of politics for the public were sidelines to bring in whatever face the BBC deemed to be ‘so hot right now’ to cover the Budget.
My big role, for which I had served years of rigorous training by then was, I’m not joking, to down my microphone and camera team, and go to the ante-chamber to the press gallery in Parliament to pick up boxes of the Red Book and Budget guide produced by the Treasury, and only released the moment the Chancellor sits down, and run as fast as I could with the weight of multiple packs of paper back out of Parliament by the quickest route across the road, and into the BBC studios to hand out to which ever face and producer was deemed to be those who needed them most.
It was like the film 1917, but without the carnage. Run through the lines to beat whichever poor soul from ITV and Sky had the same job and felt equally underused to get the details back to the broadcasters in the studio. These days I swear they must mass email, surely.
It don’t relate this rather humiliating moment in my career just for entertainment, but to signal a point.
When a Chancellor sits down, the lobby press often leave their gallery in the Chamber to grab their own copy of the Red Book – not Mao’s ‘Little Red Book’ that still stuns me brocialist John McDonnell once brandished from the dispatch box – and to hear first-hand from the Chancellor’s spinners in a huddle behind the scenes about what the Chancellor meant and what the big headline items are in case any of the poor saps had missed it.
Of course in the Chamber the actual leader of the Opposition, in today’s case Conservative Kemi Badenoch and increasingly not Reform’s Nigel Farage, is standing up and responding to the Budget. Often the post Chancellor’s speech spin huddle is of more value to the press, than the opposition response.
This of course will suit the Government today because as well as dampening expectations on their part – as I said on Monday this Budget is designed not to sell an idea of Healy as a radical economic genius, or to buy growth, or buy credibility, but to buy time. It’s to get through the next few weeks without scaring the horses or the markets so they can attempt an early election.
It is also hoped in Number 10, that Badenoch does not have the space and opportunity to publicly wipe the smiles and smirks off the government front bench as she eviscerates the Budget that’s just been presented. They are very well aware of the fact that she’s capable of it, that last year she solidified her own position on the back of giving Reeves, rhetorically, both barrels, and they want that dampened down too. She’ll push on any defence spending announcements, and any gaps in how Burnham’s wish lists lack costings or funding, and hers don’t.
The opposition response is a hard one, and last time the Labour defensive line up was shocking, conceding hit after palpable hit. They think this year they’ll be ready for her.
Which may or may not be how it pans out.
I still maintain, and, increasingly so do MPs on all sides, that this is step two in the path to Burnham trying to gamble. To those saying it’ll be a pre-Christmas snap election, I’d caution that sequentially, Burnham buys time with a dullish Budget, launches his ‘ten year plan’ loaded with wish, vibe and promises, and then we get into the serious will he- won’t he.
Don’t expect fireworks, but look out for the tell-tale signs today that something bigger may be afoot.