One set of businesses are already feeling the pain from the successful completion of the spending review. Westminster pizza outlets have come to rely on large orders from the Treasury the night before a spending review or Budget announcement, but the deal was sealed on Sunday night, and so all was calm last night in Westminster. George Osborne still snuck in a cheeky burger and chips (and thought it a good idea to tweet a slightly unappetising picture of himself tucking in), but that was as he made his finishing touches to the speech itself, rather than an attempt to keep going through last-minute negotiations with an angry Cabinet colleague.
Parliament will be buzzing, but we’re unlikely to get much more detail today beyond how much each department will cut. A few papers trail some of the more popular decisions: a ‘temperature test’ for expat winter fuel payments and more money for the spooks.
And the stand-up rows that were expected ended up being more snide asides than anything else. By and large this spending review has underlined the determination at the top to keep the Coalition together to 2015. Nick Clegg has not exploded in public, and even Vince Cable, who has been happy for it to be known that he could have exploded in the negotiations, settled on Sunday night rather than pushing things to the wire. Cable shows less animosity towards Osborne than he does towards his own Lib Dem colleague Danny Alexander, who he suspects of going native at the Treasury. The same goes for the Tories: their rows were as much about party fault lines as they were about Coalition, although the National Union of Ministers lobbied hard for welfare to take more of the strain from the outset.
One other awkward cross-party relationship to watch is between Clegg and Michael Gove. The pair were already barely getting along after Clegg decided to veto plans for relaxing childcare ratios, and the pair also tussled over the possibility that free nursery places could go in the spending review.
But ministers will be hoping the divisions today will be ones with Labour, sealing any remaining Coalition fractures. Any fool would bet on ‘global race’ making an appearance, but watch out for ministers trying to bring Labour into the political race, too. George Osborne will want to paint this review as packed with difficult decisions, even though both he and his opponents know that there’s a lot of pain to come after 2015: the IFS reminded us again this morning of that black hole that will have to be filled either with tax rises or spending cuts. The Tories think they can fill the £9bn void using the latter, Labour will be unlikely to do so, but it will be equally reluctant to talk about the tax rises that it would have to rely on instead. This is a big dividing line that will become increasingly prominent in the next few months, but Osborne will inevitably find other areas today to prod Labour over.
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