Notes on the annual ritual in which a Chancellor holds up a briefcase and the nation pretends to follow the sums
The Red Box, the Glass of Water and the Speech Nobody Understands: Budget Day From the Editor’s Chair
Budget week approaches, and the office is preparing as a coastal town prepares for a spring tide. I have been through enough of these to know the drill. I offer here my notes on the day as it always goes, written in advance, because the only things that change from year to year are the numbers, and nobody remembers those.
I should say that I am not an economist. I took the subject for a year at university and was advised, kindly, to stop. But one does not need to understand the public finances to edit a paper on Budget day. One needs to understand theatre.
The Photograph
It begins on the doorstep of Number 11 Downing Street. At the appointed hour the Chancellor of the Exchequer emerges, flanked by junior ministers arranged by height, and holds aloft a battered scarlet briefcase. The cameras fire for half a minute. The Chancellor smiles in a manner intended to convey prudence. Then everybody gets into cars.
The box is the thing. For a century and a half nearly every Chancellor carried the same one, made for Gladstone around 1860, lined in black satin and covered in red leather. By the time it was finally retired a few years ago it was so fragile that it was said to be held together chiefly by tradition. A replacement is now used. The word budget itself comes from an old French word for a little bag, so the briefcase is, strictly, the budget, and the speech merely its contents.
The contents are meant to be secret until delivered. A Chancellor named Dalton resigned in 1947 because he murmured a few of his tax changes to a journalist on his way into the chamber and they appeared in an evening paper before he had reached that part of his speech. These days most of it has been briefed to the newspapers for a fortnight, and Speakers complain about it annually, to no effect.
The Drink
Here is my favourite fact about the British constitution. Alcohol is forbidden in the chamber of the House of Commons, with one exception. The Chancellor, while delivering the Budget, may drink whatever he or she pleases.
The history is glorious. Gladstone, whose speeches could run beyond four hours, fortified himself with sherry beaten up with an egg. Disraeli took brandy and water. Others in the last century favoured whisky, or gin and tonic, or a spritzer. In recent decades Chancellors have, without exception, chosen plain water. I regard this as a decline. If a person is going to announce a rise in fuel duty, the country would feel better knowing they had needed a stiffener to do it.
The Speech
The Speaker does not preside. By custom the Budget is heard with a Deputy Speaker in the chair, a holdover from the days when the House sat as a committee to discuss money. And the reply is given by the Leader of the Opposition, not the shadow chancellor, who has the worst job in politics: standing up to answer an hour of dense figures having had no sight of them in advance. The reply is therefore written beforehand, about a Budget that has not yet been heard. Nobody seems to mind.
The speech itself follows a pattern as fixed as a church service. First the state of the economy, which is always resilient. Then the forecasts for growth and borrowing. Then a long middle section of measures, each presented as a gift. Then, traditionally, a surprise at the end, held back to send the backbenches home cheering: a penny off something, a freeze on something else. In the trade it is called the rabbit. One learns to wait a day before judging the rabbit, because the real news is always in the supporting documents.
The Language
This is where my pencil comes out. Budget prose is a dialect of its own. Nothing is cut; savings are identified. Nothing is taxed; contributions are asked for. Spending is investment when we do it and waste when they did. Any gap between income and outgoings is now a black hole, a phrase that has lost all meaning through repetition, since an actual black hole does not have a figure attached and cannot be filled by freezing allowances.
My particular favourite is fiscal headroom, which means the amount by which the Chancellor expects not to break a rule the Chancellor has set, in a year that has not happened, on the basis of a forecast that will be revised. It is always described to the nearest hundred million. I find that touching.
The Referee
One real improvement in my working lifetime deserves a line. Since 2010 the economic forecasts have been produced not by the Treasury but by an independent body, the Office for Budget Responsibility, which publishes its own assessment of the public finances on the same day. Before that, Chancellors marked their own homework and were invariably pleased with it. The watchdog’s document is long, dry and far more informative than the speech. I make my writers read the summary before they are allowed to attempt a joke. The speech itself is printed in Hansard, and the measures are published in full by the Treasury.
What We Shall Do
Our plan on the day never varies. One writer watches the doorstep and the box. One listens to the speech with the dialect dictionary. One, the unlucky one, reads the small print and tells the rest of us at about four o’clock what has actually happened. It is always different from what was said at half past twelve. The gap between the two is where a paper like ours earns its keep.
I have a standing instruction that no piece may rest on a concocted figure that could be confused with a real one. The real ones are quite strange enough. Our sister title, The London Prat, makes the same demand in its piece on running a satirical website, and it is one reason readers can generally trust that if a number appears in our pages unadorned, it came from the red book and not from our heads. If they are unsure, the UK checklist for telling satire from real news will serve.
A Word From the Market
My late father, who kept a fruit stall and knew more about money than any Chancellor I have watched, had his own Budget ritual. He would listen to the whole speech on the wireless in silence. At the end he would say, right, what has gone up, and my mother would tell him, and that was the analysis. He called the Chancellor’s briefcase the jack-in-the-box and the Treasury the bees and honey, which is the old rhyme for money. I looked it up today in the Prat’s guide to Cockney rhyming slang and found he had been perfectly orthodox.
What has gone up. I have read a great many learned commentaries since and I am not sure any has improved on it.
Until the Day
So the writers have their assignments for this paper, the English satirical news desk has put in its bid for the rabbit, and I have laid in sandwiches. I shall watch the doorstep with the old affection, count the black holes and wait for four o’clock.
I shall also be drinking sherry with an egg in it, in memory of Gladstone. Somebody should. Past Budgets, survived and otherwise, are in the cuttings file over here.