The Spectator’s Notes | 15 March 2008

In the cut and thrust of debate, David Cameron won easily against the Chancellor in the Budget battle.

In the cut and thrust of debate, David Cameron won easily against the Chancellor in the Budget battle. He was crisp and effective. But Alistair Darling did not attempt thrust and certainly will not cut. The fact that his Budget had nothing in it and could barely be spun out for 50 minutes was wholly intentional, and was, in fact, the right thing to do. Mr Cameron said that Mr Darling and Gordon Brown were in a hole and were digging. That might be true of the government more broadly, but it was not true of this Budget. The Chancellor is not digging, nor, on the other hand, is he trying to climb out. He is sitting perfectly still, hoping to emerge when the storm has passed. For this role, the dreary Mr Darling is ideally suited. His argument is that all the bad things that are happening are to do with global forces beyond his control. If this is so, the logic is not to pretend you can control them, and he is following that logic. Politically, it is not an easy one for the Tories to crack.

A friend of mine was quite recently the foreman of a jury. The case concerned a priest who was accused of serious paedophile crimes committed a long time ago. He was convicted and sentenced, though he is now an old man, to many years in prison. My friend now feels uneasy about the whole thing. The case was mismanaged so that it was unnecessarily protracted, putting extra pressure on the jurors to decide. And it struck him that the evidence against the man was extraordinarily thin, because it consisted of nothing but the assertions of two brothers about what had been done to them, many of which were vague and some of which conflicted with one another.