Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, rabbit. The Tory backbenchers were starting to get a bit restless. They wanted their pre-election feelgood rabbit but the chancellor just wanted to rabbit. And cluck. Sudden weight loss, sweaty forehead, pallid features and half-dead eyes; George Osborne had been re-reading Trainspotting.
“We choose the future, we choose families, we choose the future,” he began. The second future was a different future to the first future: in the second future you also got a fucking big TV thrown in. The chancellor had first tried his line in junky-chic at the Conservative party conference last September and it hadn’t gone down particularly well then, either. A typical Osborne speech works best as aversion therapy and the Tories generally try to limit his public appearances. For the budget, they have to grin and bear it.
Britain was the Comeback Country, he declared, and everything was now so much rosier under the Tories. Osborne was clearly in no mood to ask the Lib Dems to come back. “The sun is starting to shine,” he said. Britain was too good for this world. The national debt was increasing more slowly. The banks were doing well: the food banks were doing even better. He had created a northern powerhouse and he was in the process of creating a Midlands 12-volt battery. Insurgent industries were booming: especially Isis.
Best of all, church-roof coffers were overflowing and the quality of public services was so high that it would be unnecessary and boastful to mention the NHS. The last time things had been this good was at the Battle of Agincourt. Osborne’s new haircut finally made sense. It was Trainspotting’s Begbie channeling Laurence Olivier as Henry V. A disturbing thought. “We are all in this together,” he insisted, taking a quick slug of something pale and yellow. Labour thought he might have been taking the piss; it turned out to be just elderflower cordial.
Even by the egotistical standards of political life, 25 minutes of self-congratulation is pushing it a bit and the only person now lapping up every word was George Osborne’s mother. His biggest fan – and perhaps his only truly loyal one. His wife, Frances, looked like she had lost the will to live much earlier on, while Lord Mandelson and Lord Archer were taking bets on which one of them was going to stab the other in the back first. Nigel Lawson absented himself from this competition by playing dead.
“I’m now going to move on,” Osborne said. A few Tories looked up hopefully. Perhaps this was the long-awaited rabbit. It wasn’t. The chancellor had something else in mind; he was going to tell some bad jokes to which he could add a policy announcement that no one was bothered about. “White vans going over the Severn bridge will have to pay less in tolls,” he smirked. Boom boom. “We are going to fund the internet of things, so that people can control two fridges in different kitchens.” Boom boom. It’s the way he tells them. No wonder Frances looked so desperate: George had probably already tried out those gags on her over breakfast and they hadn’t improved.
With just a few pages of his speech to go, there were some concerned faces. A bit of good economic news was all very well, but they wanted their election-winning rabbit. Where was it?
“I’m here,” squeaked a new help-to-buy Isa for first-time buyers.
“We wish to register a complaint,” the Tories moaned. “You’re not a rabbit.”
“I must be,” the Isa replied, “I’m the only bit of the budget that wasn’t leaked in advance. That definitely makes me a rabbit. Non leakito, ergo sum.”
“Don’t get clever. You’re not going to be much of a vote-winner in Tory marginals, are you? You are an ex-rabbit.”
“Can we settle on a guinea pig with large ears?”
“No.”
