Bye-bye budget box, hello backpack

It may be a battered old economy that George Osborne holds up for public inspection in the budget. But it will not be William Gladstone's battered old red budget box that he holds up for the snappers outside No 11 at the start of the annual ritual. Like much else in modern Britain it has stood up to a battering for 150 years, but finally given up the ghost. The historically minded chancellor was allowed to use it one last time when he delivered his first budget last June – but only on the strict understanding that it would then be allowed to enjoy not-so-early retirement, displayed in the Cabinet War Rooms under Whitehall, the nerve-centre from which Churchill conducted the defence against Hitler. The Gladstone box was a quaint relic of the good old days when chancellors really did come down from their fiscal Olympus once a year (more or less) and set out their plans, which, in Gladstone's case, included the eventual abolition of income tax. He never quite got there. Gladstone's box was made around 1860 and was much like other ministerial boxes, then and now. Pillar-box red leather embossed with the royal cipher on the outside, made of slow-grown pine lined with lead (to sink if thrown overboard and bomb-proof, unlike its owner, on dry land), they can cost up to £750 a pop. Ex-ministers are allowed to keep one as a memento. Because Gladstone was such an enduring figure in the Victorian imagination later chancellors of exchequer got into the habit of using his box (and his robes) and have done so ever since with two exceptions. One was Jim Callaghan, Labour's reforming chancellor in 1964, whose tenure ended with the car crash of devaluation in 1967. As a moderniser, he preferred a new red box. Yet "Sunny Jim" survived this breach with hallowed tradition to recover and become a tail-end prime minister in 1976, doomed to lose to Margaret Thatcher in 1979. Strange to report, but a similar career trajectory befell the other defier of Treasury tradition, one Gordon Brown. In 1997, Brown had a new box made by apprentices from his local shipyard at Rosyth in Fife, who shared his photo-op outside No 11. Alistair Darling reverted to tradition. The only other chancellor not to keep the budget in the Gladstone box was George Ward-Hunt, but that was because he opened the box on budget day 1868 to find he'd left the speech at home.