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One of the oddities of British political tradition is that it is the leader of the opposition, rather than the shadow chancellor, who responds to the Budget statement (and the deputy speaker rather than the speaker presides over proceedings). Often, this has wrongfooted the leader of the opposition for a number of reasons. First, the opposition leader may not be as thoroughly grounded in the contemporary political debate over the economy as the shadow chancellor, who lives and breathes it. Second, the chancellor may do something quite unexpected, and complicated, that renders the opposition leader’s pre-prepared speech instantly out of date and useless, and leaves them utterly exposed. For example, a chancellor introducing a dramatic new lower tax rate of, say, 10p or 20p in the pound (as Gordon Brown and Norman Lamont did, respectively, in 1999 and 1992) left William Hague and Neil Kinnock, in their turn, having to bluster through it, unable to tell, at a glance, whether it necessarily made taxpayers better off. Third, the response is more or less immediate, with little time for improvisation. With social distancing in the Commons chamber, it wasn’t even easy for the shadow chancellor, Anneliese Dodds, to whisper an answer or two in Keir Starmer’s ear. This year was rather different all round. The most striking departure from the past, apart from the scale of the numbers for borrowing and spending, is that the Budget was trailed so extensively. The whole convention of Budget secrecy has been silently abandoned with hardly anyone seeming to notice. In the past, Budget “leaks” have warranted the resignation of ministers, but no longer. So far from the “purdah” under which the chancellor and his colleagues used to remain silent for weeks before Budget day, they now do the media round and drop as many heavy hints as they wish. The rest is provided to the media, with suitable spin. More

Every time a people trafficker loads a refugee or an economic migrant on to a flimsy dinghy and launches them into the English Channel, they are passing a potential death sentence on those they exploit. Should the people traffickers themselves not be subject to a commensurate sentence of life imprisonment? It is already a serious offence, carrying a jail sentence of 14 years as a maximum. However, the home secretary, Priti Patel, is not satisfied with how this has worked in practice, pointing to what she says is an average sentence of three years. Natural justice might demand a more punitive sanction. Patel also has highly attuned political instincts for what her party and its electoral base would wish to see. Immigration is obviously an issue that has climbed up the political agenda during the Brexit process, and the home secretary must be aggrieved to see Nigel Farage and his Reform Party making political capital out of the continuing arrival of migrants at the shores of Dover. More

When Rishi Sunak delivered his first Budget on 11 March last year, he had been in the post for just over three weeks and assumed it was the most difficult task he would face in the job. The  annual statement to the House of Commons is normally the culmination of months of preparation, the moment when a chancellor can put his stamp on the direction of the country and when his – and so far it has always been his – decisions come under scrutiny of the most intense kind.Few chancellors have had their reputations made or destroyed by a single Budget, but it is a day when individual gaffes or masterstrokes can fundamentally alter voters’ perceptions of the government and its competence. More

The European Research Group is a body of around 70 to 80 Conservative backbench MPs with a wider penumbra of sympathisers in government, including the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg, Suella Braverman and Michael Gove. It is chaired by Mark Francois, and Steve Baker is another prominent spokesperson for it. They regard themselves as the Spartan warriors of the Eurosceptic movement. On a good day and on the right issue it could wipe out the government’s present majority, and frequently did so when Theresa May and Boris Johnson were running minority governments and trying to get their various Brexit deals through the Commons before the December 2019 election. Since then, the opportunities for Brexit mischief have subsided, but the operation of the Northern Ireland protocol has opened up a new front. The ERG want it scrapped, and, superficially, they have some strong arguments. More

There’s nothing as ex as an ex-prime minister,” so they say, but that has never stopped our most senior elder statesmen and stateswomen from trying to prove otherwise. Usually they make no difference; sometimes it can be fun to watch. David Cameron is an interesting example. Telling Boris Johnson to be more “muscular” in his environmentalism might carry more authority had Cameron not turned down the offer of chairing the COP26 Climate Conference in November. It’s also worth recalling how he once famously dismissed the climate crisis as “green crap” and fitted a ludicrous miniature windmill to his house in Notting Hill, derided as the ultimate in pretentious token politics and rumoured to be powered off the mains. The Coalition government he led might have had some success is getting CO2 emissions down, but part of that was by crashing the economy into an austerity recession. In his memoirs Cameron did take the opportunity to tell a few home truths about Johnson in his memoirs, published in 2019, but bybthen it was far too late. Knowing that Johnson never believed in Brexit might have been handier Intelligence had we known about it earlier. More

There can be few cases more complicated and tortured than the war by proxy between Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon. The pair, once political allies and firm friends, are now engaged in mortal political combat. If the latest explosive claims made by Salmond against Sturgeon and others are upheld, it will mean that, among other things, she lied to the Scottish parliament, broke the ministerial code and she will have to resign. Resign, that is, in the middle of a pandemic during which she has mostly been held to have acquitted herself well, with crucial parliamentary elections in a matter of weeks, and little public clamour for her to go.It is an extraordinary state of affairs. It might have been better, all round, if their differences, profound and vital though they are, could have somehow been resolved in the purely political domain. Instead, they have been, and are continuing to be, fought in legal and quasi-legal arenas, with procedure taking precedence over substance, and bewilderingly so. More