I always approach Budget Day in the UK with much enthusiasm. Rather than watch it on TV, I prefer to listen to it on the radio, on BBC Radio Four, which respects the listener's intelligence by allowing you to listen to it uninterrupted by half-baked analysis and banal comment.
This year, for the first time ever, I fell asleep halfway through. I woke up just as Chancellor 'Your eyes are getting heavier and heavier' Darling was commending his Budget to the house. I am assured that I didn't miss much, apart from an outbreak of blatant electioneering, wealth-based spite and a ragbag of ill-assorted measures that don't add up to, as I believe they say in the US, a row of beans. I do wonder, though, what lurks in the small print, where the devil of the detail almost always lies with a New Labour Budget.
