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The UK’s annual budget wasn’t supposed to be fun any more. What takes the US months of protracted negotiations, votes, amendments and threatened amendments, Britain gets done in one speech lasting about an hour. The chancellor announces, point by point, all the changes in taxation and spending for the next financial year. No leaks are allowed; a chancellor once had to resign just for telling a reporter about tobacco tax on his way to the House of Commons. Guidance was non-existent. Treasury press officers would stand in newsrooms, handing out printed copies after each section of the speech was completed; nobody could know anything before MPs did. Financial news hacks then stayed at their typewriters until midnight, deperately churning out copy as the hours ticked by. Oh yes, I remember it well.