Tonight:
4°c
- Drinkers hammered: beer up 4p, wine up 14p
- Non-doms 'still wary' of Darling's tax plans
- More tax on drink - you'll drive us all to Calais, Darling
- The party's over and the day of reckoning dawns
- Pretty dull, Alistair. That's good
- Quiet man who has proved too meek to inherit Brown's legacy
- Darling struggles to deliver crowd-pleasers
- Darling's in a hole but Brown is to blame, says Cameron
Mogadon man, the 21st century equivalent of being savaged by a dead sheep, the safe pair of hands who dropped a series of clangers: Alistair Darling arrived for his first budget trailing the debris of botched capital gains tax and enraged nondoms in his wake with a great lump of Northern Rock shackled to his ankles.
For his first Budget, the new Chancellor had gone for broke in a purple tie, which looked a bit startling.
In the outside world, the US government is pouring credit into the banking system to stave off a credit crunch, growth forecasts are being slashed, house sales stall.
Here in Budgetworld, things are always tickety-boo, though. Low inflation, low unemployment and of course Britain being "better placed to withstand the global slowdown" , "more resilient and more prepared". Well you know the rest: not least because they come straight from the Teach Yourself Brownese lexicon of tried and trusted Gordon clichés.
Mr Brown had decided not to look nervous at watching his protegé step up to the event he considered his oneman show, so he adopted one of those hyper-bright smiles you see on the faces of anxious parents at school concerts.
Mr Darling's delivery is one of those refined Scottish burrs which grows more soporific as it goes on. It enables him to issue dire warnings like: "A major risk to the world economy" with no audible change to his tone. It enables him to invert unwelcome realities with phrases like "given the fundamental strength of our public finances". Come again: how big would the budget deficit have to be to qualify as unhealthy? A vast borrowing forecast of £43 billion - up £7 billion on the most recent prediction - does not strike most of us as a sign of plump economic wellbeing.
What is Mr Darling like when explaining his credit card bill to the bank? "I think you'll find that £43 billion is very reasonable in the current economic climate."
When it comes to unwelcome news, he is the ideal messenger, since he makes the shocking or scary sound merely dull. Perhaps it is just the memory of Mr Brown bellowing out his confident war cries: "I can do more!" and "Oh yes, Mr Speaker", but I kept waiting for Mr Darling to get going, long after he actually had. It is still like watching the warm-up act, rather than the main show.
Even the Labour benches sounded unsure about when to cheer. Chief secretary to the Treasury Yvette Cooper had gone in to a miserable reverie (she's seen all the real figures). Only the perpetually perky Harriet Harman managed the odd encouraging interjection.
The disadvantage of this is that Mr Darling buries the good news along with the bad. Child benefit went up with such a limp flourish that MPs missed it, corporation tax was marked down to 28 per cent, but it all passed in a flash.
John Hutton, the Enterprise Secretary and one-man friend to business, looked thoroughly unimpressed. Trouble ahead there. Mark down Mr Hutton as the man most likely to say "told you so," if it all goes wrong for Mr Brown.
Mr Darling tried one witticism on the non-dom fiasco: "The sums did not add up - and not for the first time given the source from which that representation came". There was a rather good joke lurking in here about the non-dom shenanigans being set off by George Osborne's raid on wealthy foreigners. Alas it was mortally wounded by the comatose delivery.
A terrible thought must have dawned on his colleagues: if he survives this time of trouble, they will have to go through this again next year. At the end, he slipped in hefty rises on strong drink. A shame. After an hour listening to Mr Darling, you might well feel you need one.
