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.