There was a time when the secrecy of the Budget was sacrosanct. In 1947 Hugh Dalton, the Labour Chancellor, had to resign for briefing journalists on its contents a mere 20 minutes before he spoke in the House of Commons.
Even more remarkably, when in 1996 the Daily Mirror got hold of 36 Budget documents, then-editor Piers Morgan returned them to the Government without publishing them, saying he had “a public duty to return such sensitive documents” (although Tony Blair was very well-prepared on the big day).
What a contrast with this morning, when the papers report the Speaker furiously rebuking Rachel Reeves for drip-feeding details of the upcoming Budget to the press long before she formally announces them to the House of Commons tomorrow.
Sir Lindsay Hoyle is entirely right to fight the good fight. Protecting the prerogatives of Parliament is his job. But it is a forlorn battle; in the era of 24-hour media and the leaky WhatsApp group, the days of secrecy and discipline on the Budget (and indeed, nearly everything else in politics) are long behind us.
Indeed, the only real distinction between Labour and the previous Conservative governments is the strategy they employ when leaking the contents.
Year after year, the Tories’ approach was to spend the weeks leading up to Budget day slowly unveiling all the goodies, save one or two the Chancellor held back to try and give journalists something nice to write about on the day itself.
This approach was pretty reliable at generating a few days of good headlines, but had the obvious downside that once the entire thing was published, most of the news left to come out was negative.
Labour has taken a different approach. From unveiling the cuts to the Winter Fuel Allowance weeks ahead of anything else, the Shadow Chancellor’s approach seems to have been to tease lots of bad news.
Even poor Sir Keir Starmer seems to have been caught out, pivoting in a single day from promising to protect people from austerity to sternly refusing to rule out further tax rises and making a pious virtue of his willingness to “defend tough decisions all day long”.
Is the goal here simply to set expectations so low that the actual Budget comes as a pleasant surprise? Are there simply so many horrors in it that the Government thought it wiser to spread out the bad news?
Or is this simply the latest evidence that Reeves and Starmer lack the old New Labour knack for media management, yet more self-inflicted wounds by a ministry that seems simply incapable of putting a decent grid together?
Regardless, it’s a pretty poor show. But even if MPs have enough residual self-respect to be angry at the Chancellor for treating them as an afterthought, any fair observer must admit that the diminution of the House of Commons is, in large part, MPs’ own fault.
It was MPs, after all, who went gleefully along with Robin Cook in the early Noughties when he slashed its sitting hours. Imagine what earlier generations of legislators would make of the now-standard sight of our elected representatives having to apply to speak on important bills – and having their contributions cut to two minutes to squeeze in as many as possible?
One reason Starmer has likely backed away from root-and-branch reform of the House of Lords is the simple fact that the Upper House is actually more important than it was two decades ago, because it does so much of the actual scrutiny with which the Commons can no longer be bothered.
Nor are they even done: new MPs are reportedly pushing for even more cuts to their sitting hours, justified solely on the fact that it would let a minority of MPs with families in London see a bit more of them.
So yes, the Chancellor should take the Commons more seriously. But the least backbench MPs could do is do the same.