Gentlemen in suits no longer call at one’s door selling things. Sometimes shaggy young men in football shirts turn up with baskets of sponges and rags. But the days of polite young men selling insurance and encyclopaedias seem to have passed.

In their stead, we have this nice young fellow on the television. He is smart and well-spoken and has learned a lot of information. And he brings us things we need with solemn charm.

Not all the words he says make sense. And sometimes he seems to say things which sound as though they might not be true. But he looks very well washed. His hair is shiny. He is going to rebalance the economy.

Sometimes his voice arches upwards, like a teenaged frog’s. But he cannot help this. He is still young and there are people harrumphing at him. He has made further decisions on taxation. The sovereign debt crisis has caused a lot of problems.

He has set up the Office of Budgetary Responsiblity because the other people played fast and loose with the targets. But the OBR is independent, so the targets are now safe. The Labour people missed all the targets anyway. In future, there will be no backward looking targets. The fiscal mandate will be forward looking. It will accelerate the pace of fiscal consolidation. And it will be supplemented by a fixed target to debt.

Nothing like this happened under the previous fellow. He was much older and had funny hair. The men who used to set the bad targets for him will now be in charge of the independent forward looking fiscal mandate for the nice young fellow with the shiny hair.

This is an unavoidable budget. He has made that very clear and said so in terms.  Avoiding budgets is not in this young chap’s DNA. He did not get to be so successful in this thing he does, and at such a young age, by avoiding budgets.

And he is not going to hide the hard choices or bury them in the small print. There was another chap with a clunking fist who was always burying the hard choices in the small print.  Even when there weren’t any hard choices, he would smother them in tiny writing when nobody was looking. He couldn’t help it either.

Apparently, the coalition believes that the country has over-spent. So the debt has gone massive. The other fellows were building a mountain of it because they were mad. This young shiny fellow has never seen a mountain like it. It’s a 62% mountain. A more than £600bn mountain. He looks so honest and small looking up at the mountain of debt and lies.

But he is like Jack the beanstalk. He is going to do battle with the mountain. Every year he is going to cut and slash the mountain.  By the time he is finished, in 2015, he will have halved it to £711bn, or 67%. The independent people who work for him in the OBR have said that he is well on track to meet our goals.

A man called Will Hutton is going to draw up plans for fair play across the public sector. The people at the top will be forced to play twenty times fairer than the people at the bottom. Racism will get the red card. Will Hutton once wrote a book that the shiny haired chap really hated.

Another Hutton is going to look into pensions. This Hutton has recently retired, so that is quite right. Only men called Hutton are allowed to help.

Now the young fellow has reached what used to be the small print. The clunking fist and the silver hair used to bury the small print in the small print.  Young shiny is not going to do this.  He is honest and puts fairness first.

He has replaced the small print with fast print. The swingeing cuts to tax credits, the health in pregnancy grant, the surestart grant, the savings gateway – it all comes out as “shhrrrrrrmmml”.  So quickly does young Shiny speak when he gets to the family cuts that it all comes out as a single, elongated, posh sound: “shhrrrrrmmml”.

Sated, he ends with a shiny flourish: “we are a progressive alliance”, he proclaims.

Tags: Budget, budget sketch, osbourne, Siôn Simon, sketch

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