CITY AND SUBURBAN
Dry on the label but sweet in the bottle, here's to a budget for owners
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
Next weekend the Treasury lets its hair down. It will not go down very far, because the Treasury does not believe in extrava- gance, for hair or for anything else, but there may be charades and even paper hats. This is the annual outing to Cheven- ing, grandest of the country houses in the Prime Minister's patronage. The Treasury gets to borrow it for a January weekend, and early next Friday a cavalcade of official cars will come bowling down the Kentish lanes, bearing the Chancellor, his ministers and his mandarins. In these civilised sur- roundings, far from the urgencies and distractions of their gloomy pile, they work out their ideas for the Budget. This will be Norman Lamont's first Chevening weekend as Chancellor, and it will be up to him to make sure that it isn't his last, for his premise must be that this is the budget on which his party will fight the election. In the old days, such a budget would be easy to draft and easier to forecast — a penny off beer to please the masses and a cut in income tax to please the middle classes. Nowadays, though, they would rather have a cut in their mortgage payments, and have even been heard to grumble that lower income tax makes their tax relief less worth having. Nigel Lawson's was an election- winning budget in the modern style. Con- descending only to a quick fudge of the inflation rate, it was got up to look responsible and statesmanlike. The fire- works came in his next budget, once the election was won. It is true that Mr Lawson had staged a pre-election boom, while Mr Lamont has to make what he can of a pre-election recession, but I expect a simi- lar style.
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