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Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

It is more likely that Charlie Whelan is trying to deal with the problem if there is some discrepancy in what the Chief Secretary says in public. I trust that the Secretary of State is playing no part in whatever is being done to re-educate the Chief Secretary. I normally have a very good relationship with the Secretary of State—we come from the same part of the world—and I would have been happy to go down memory lane and debate schools and education with him had I known that the Government intended to try to turn the last day of the Budget debate into such a debate. I knew that the Secretary of State would take part in the Budget debate, as he did last year. He often does, but that is because he thinks that he should take part in all Budget debates. I commiserate with the right hon. Gentleman on that front, because events have moved on even in the last week or two. He has concealed today what must be his deep and bitter disappointment, because he was beside himself with rage when he was not made Chancellor of the Exchequer last year. For some unknown reason, the Prime Minister has just announced that our current interim Chancellor might be reappointed in the unlikely event of the Government being re-elected. So, with patience, the right hon. Gentleman has to hold himself in exile at the Department for Children, Schools and Families, waiting for what he always believed would be his inheritance—to be Chancellor of the Exchequer. I am sure that he is dying to deliver and explain the Budget, given that, I strongly suspect, he had quite a large input into it—as he has had a considerable input into economic policy ever since he first emerged in opposition as the acolyte of the Prime Minister. We all remember with wonder that amazing speech on neoclassical endogenous growth theory—[Interruption.] Post-neoclassical!