The first budget I covered was in 2006. I had been a press gallery reporter for the Press Association for just a few months, spending long days (and nights) sitting in the seat above the speaker’s chair, then filing rolling coverage of everything (or at least the newsworthy bits) said in the Commons.
But on that budget day I was in the PA office, just along a corridor outside the gallery, where there is a row of wooden phone booths where reporters used to rush out to phone in their copy. Inside there was just a telephone, a ledge for your notebook, and an ashtray. These days it’s just used for storing the Henry Hoover.
That Wednesday in March 2006 I got to see the budget being revealed in real time. Literally. A senior civil servant had appeared in the office just moments before Gordon Brown stood up at the despatch box. The official didn’t speak to anyone while clutching a leather bag. Inside, it turned out, was the budget. Or at least the chancellor’s budget speech.
And as Brown spoke, the official would reveal each line by moving a piece of card slowly down the sheets of paper. Like a low-tech autocue. The PA reporter sitting next to him could then type up the key newslines (double-checking all of the figures of course) before hitting send and the lines would instantly flash up in newsrooms all over the country.
By the following year I was working as London Editor of the Western Morning News, still based in Parliament but covering politics for readers in Cornwall, Devon and Somerset. A one-man lobby team, trying to compete with the nationals that had half a dozen or more. Fun though. Especially when cider taxes were in the news.
The budgets I covered at the Independent on Sunday were less fun - it was either clueless previews in advance or mopping up afterwards. All the action was midweek so fell to the dailies. I would still go to the post-budget huddle, where the treasury spin team go through the budget line-by-line, while dozens of hacks tried to spot the blackhole.
I was there in the huddle in 2012 when there was just the first whisper of journalistic doubt and mischief about a small measure to equalise VAT on hot takeaway food. Which became known as the pasty tax. It only raised a tiny amount but it dominated the headlines. Chaos. David Cameron boasted of eating a pasty from a shop at Leeds station that had closed down. Ed Miliband went into a Greggs but looked as startled and uncomfortable as a vicar in a lingerie department. Luckily Ed Balls was on hand to order, carefully asking for six sausage rolls in separate bags (to catch the crumbs while they ate in the car). The coalition u-turned.
At MailOnline I didn’t have much time to think about what was actually in the budget. From the moment the chancellor got up, I was bashing out quotes, refreshing the headline and intro each time a new announcement trumped the last. I used to have a good Whitehall source in those days who would give me a rundown about half an hour before the budget, confirming what had been briefed beforehand and adding some other vague tip like “there’s a big announcement on housing two-thirds of the way through” or “the tax stuff at the end is the rabbit out of the hat”. Not market-moving, but bloody handy.
At The Times I once posed waving around a red box to promote our budget coverage. Except it was actually a junior minister’s official red box, essentially a heavy wooden briefcase. After a career of typing, I have no upper body strength. I was hopeless. As Rachel Reeves told me last week, there is no need for special exercises to raise the official red budget box - it’s a fraction of the size and weight, capable of holding a few sheets of A4 but not much else.
The original Gladstone box dating back to around 1850 has been retired and is now kept on display in the foyer of the Treasury. In 1997 Brown had swapped it for a new one. New Labour, new budget box. Old school Alistair Darling went back to the Gladstone one. George Osborne couldn’t wait to get his hands on it in 2010 after five years as shadow chancellor. Nervous Treasury curators said it was too fragile to use, but Osborne insisted. There was just one problem: nobody could find the key. “When I stood out there on the first budget,” Osborne once told me. “I had no speech in that box.”
Covering budgets on Times Radio was easy. I went on air at 10am, then at 12.30pm I would say “and now it’s live to the Commons got the budget”. And I went off air at 1pm, so all the analysis and reaction was done by later shows.
This year the role has reversed. Naga Munchetty will be on 5 Live with all the build up from 11am, and she will throw to the Commons. And then after we’ve heard from Reeves (and Rishi Sunak, for the last time S Tory leader), Naga and I will be tag teaming all afternoon: she’s in Tamworth with normal people, while I’ll be in a gazebo on College Green with politicians. Who may or may not be normal people. But is everyone a working person? That’s a debate for elsewhere.
But one working person is no longer working: the civil servant with the leather case and the printed copy of the chancellor’s speech. Apparently these days it’s all done electronically, the speech appearing line-by-line on screens for reporters to follow. Shame.
Who knows what it will be like in another two decades. Will I still be here in Westminster to be briefed by an AI hologram? Do robots even like pasties?