Cheltenham winner W elcome, at least, for two reforms which Mr
Lawson has been free to make. He has abandoned that insult to the market's intelligence, the cut in bank base rates stage-managed for Budget morning. (They did the decent thing the next day, but who was to stop them?) And at last we have a Chancellor who has re- arranged the date of his Budget so that it ceases to clash with the Champion Hurdle. It clashed last year, and it clashed, under previous Chancellors, year in, year out. sir Geoffrey Howe was willing to change his Budget day for the enthronement of the Archbishop of Canterbury, but not for that better-attended and more ecumenical fes- tival, the National Hunt meeting at Chel- tenham. Once, when I chided him for this, Sir Geoffrey took his stand on good Tory principles of seniority: there were, he said, Budgets before there were Cheltenham races, but Archbishops before there were Budgets. Nigel Lawson was not to be bound by precedent. That is, or should be, his style.
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