George Osborne and Ed Balls have just done their pre-Budget interviews with Andrew Marr. The show, though, was dominated by talks of post-election deals rather than the contents of the Budget. Ed Balls said that Labour had ‘no need, no plan, no desire’ to do any kind of deal with the SNP. But, as Andrew Marr kept pointing out to him, he wouldn’t rule it out. While when George Osborne was asked about any kind of arrangement with Ukip, he simply took the opportunity to repeat the claim that ‘voting for Nigel Farage makes Ed Miliband the likely Prime Minister’.
It was a pity, though, that more time wasn’t spent on the Budget as I suspect it will be more substantive than expected. One Downing Street source described it to me as ‘interesting’. While the Liberal Democrats concede that Osborne has persuaded them to agree to a bigger Budget than they planned for.
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