Like most of the compartments of life, politics has its own golden age against which its modern facsimile suffers by comparison. It is not entirely certain when politics' was - it may have been when Gladstone and Disraeli addressed hedgerows of bewhiskered parliamentarians at inordinate length and on matters pertaining to Britain's influence in the world - but certain things that we used to cherish in the Parliamentary cockpit just no longer seem to happen. One of these is the emergency Budget, a genre popularised by Labour chancellors of the 1970s and for which George Osborne has no time whatsoever. Mr Osborne's speciality is the emergency u-turn.
The emergency takes the form of a line of numbers stared at by Andrew Cooper, the Prime Minister's caster of opinion polls, and they tell Mr Cooper that the Government is about as popular as the weather forecast. This news is then transmitted to Mr Osborne who usually has a u-turn up his sleeve that is fit for purpose. By usually one means, of course, invariably. Mr Osborne is an inexhaustible source of u-turns. It is the one aspect of the Government's policy on renewables that is meeting with success. Sadly, science has not yet come up with a way of generating electricity from Mr Osborne's 180 degree style of policy making: as soon as it does, all our greenhouse problems will be solved. The only person capable of drawing energy from the Chancellor's perpetual state of rotation is Ed Balls, his opposite number.
Mr Balls was certainly energised in the House of Commons on Tuesday, when Mr Osborne announced his latest volte face - a decision to defer August's hike in fuel duty to the new year. Mr Osborne is very proper about his emergency u-turns: he announces them first to Parliament. This was not enough though for Mr Balls, who had been on the radio that morning demanding that the Chancellor do what the Chancellor had just done.
There is an insight here into how politicians are much more difficult to manage than small children. My children demand sweets and I say no, and then I say yes, and they are delighted. They do not leap about scorning me for having carried out a u-turn. They do not go onto the Nine O'Clock News saying that it is all very well having a bag of jelly babies, but the whole episode raises fundamental questions about my competence as a parent. Mr Balls was doing a lot of leaping about as the Chancellor announced his latest retreat. This was reassuring to Tories, who derive particular pleasure in these gloomy days for their fortunes from seeing the shadow chancellor getting agitated.
Received wisdom in the village was not that Mr Osborne's move was a politically savvy way of relieving some pressure on Britain's economy-assailed families; rather it was a panic reaction occasioned by Mr Balls having been on the radio. The evidence for this interpretation seemed largely based on the belief that Mr Osborne had forgotten to tell the Transport Secretary what he was going to do. The truth is that Mr Osborne may have forgotten that there is a Transport Secretary. Evidently, he had also neglected to tell his own junior minister, who turned up later the same evening on Newsnight to be killed by Jeremy Paxman. The interrogation of Chloe Smith (for it was she) by Mr Paxman became an instant hit among the sado-observers of the political scene. It shoeds what a thin line there can be these days between holding a government minister to account and child abuse.
The evisceration of Ms Smith would no doubt have continued to entertain us into the further reaches of the week, were it not for the more interesting news breaking that Barclays Bank had been fined £290 million for attempting to manipulate the Libor inter-bank lending rate. Up until this point, Libor (or rather Liebour) had been nothing except a brilliantly satirical way of describing the party of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown (as in New Libor, New Danger). Suddenly, everybody was talking about the story not only as if they had the first idea what the Libor inter-bank lending rate is, but that they were capable of comprehending the heinousness of Barclays' actions in trying to fool around with it. The country's profound and violent hatred of bankers, a torrent of brown and foaming bile at the best of times, once more burst its banks, inflicting flash floods of calls for heads to roll and nooses to be fashioned.
As is usual on these occasions, politicians outbid each other in their outrage. Vince Cable, typically prominent amid the outbidding, called for criminal charges against the perpetrators. In this he was following the line of Blair: Ian Blair, that is, the former Met Police Commissioner, not Tony Blair, who rarely places himself in opposition to the rich and powerful. Ed Miliband thought there should be a Leveson-style inquiry into the culture and practices of the banking industry. This would be novel, since normal protocol is to invite Lord Leveson to look into whatever happens to be upsetting us at the time, on the grounds that it has been reported in the media.
The Prime Minister meanwhile assured us that everything that needs to be done about the banks and bankers is being done. It turned out that what most needed to be done was to blame the scandal on the last Labour government in general and on Ed Balls in particular. Luckily for Mr Cameron he became engulfed in another round of scrapping with his party over Europe before he could be interrogated in depth upon this proposition.