This week's opinion: 4 November 2021

When you have been working in tax for a long time Budgets tend to merge into each other and it becomes difficult to remember what happened when. I am sure however that last week’s Budget will stand out. Not perhaps for the content – although there were some developments worth noting, as we discuss on page 8 – but what will be remembered is the stern telling off that the chancellor received from deputy speaker Eleanor Laing. This was because of the extensive leaking/briefing (choose your own word) of much of the Budget material by the Treasury in the days leading up to the speech.  

It is worth contrasting this with the fate of Hugh Dalton, the first chancellor in the post-war Labour government, who was forced to resign because he made a few unguarded remarks to a journalist on the way to deliver the 1947 Budget. The journalist managed to publish them in the evening paper 20 minutes before the speech started. Dalton lost his job and his career never really recovered. He was a notorious gossip. Clement Atlee described him as a ‘perfect ass’ who ‘always liked to have a secret to confide to somebody else’. The story goes that his political aide, who would normally have been with him and would have stopped him talking to the press, was not there – he had gone to check that there was a glass of water ready on the dispatch box for the chancellor’s use during the speech ... ‘for want of a nail…’ 

Chancellor Rishi Sunak can count himself lucky that we live in different times and that his career is unlikely to suffer as a result of what happened. Mind you, I expect that when it comes to the next Budget, a very tight lid will be kept on everything until he has delivered his speech.