One last canter round the Budget course but now it’s time to dismount

This is where I came in. Another Gordon Brown budget: how well we know them by now — the thumping delivery, the gabbled numbers, the loopholes closed and opened, so many initiatives, so much complexity, so many popular causes. British films, British science, children’s centres, cars propelled by fuel made from processed hen-droppings — are they all there this year? (Yes.) Are these the same schemes as last year’s? (Quite likely.) By now some of his audience must think that this is what budgets are like. They can never have seen or heard anyone else’s. Old hands have learnt to listen for the gaps between the sentences. What has he somehow forgotten to mention? What low ball has he saved up for the small print of an Inland Revenue notice? This week our ears were cocked for the biggest omission of all. Would he, in his modest way, tell us that he had given these budgets his best shot but that this was his last? It is surely the last of this Parliament. He knows that some chancellors dismount but more are unhorsed, even when (as Margaret Thatcher said of Nigel Lawson) their position is unassailable. He must also know that his horse is getting restive.

Doubling on losers

For this week’s dressage test, he presented what he told us was a well-trained economy, sound, steady, healthy and outpacing the lesser breeds of Europe. A stewards’ inquiry might raise awkward questions. This horse has been fattened up on a diet of imports, but one of these days it will need to get back into training. His mistake, surely, has been to build up the least competitive parts of the economy: that is, the parts for which he and his colleagues have direct responsibility. High on inflation and low on productivity, the public sector may even be getting less efficient, as it takes on hundreds of thousands more people to no obvious proportionate effect.