We want to hear the truth; we will get theatre

BUDGET day, a sign of spring for the last time. But how important is it? A profound day, or merely an entertaining one? There is a ritual to the way Budgets are reported: the main points are totted up, from the populist-trivial to the dully-important, one blob to each. Extra marks are awarded for inventiveness ('Norman's attitude to VAT particularly amused the examiners') and for 'presentation' - which means he makes a couple of ponderous jokes and manages not to read the same page twice. Enthusiasm on the Tory benches is duly recorded. So is its lack on the Labour ones.

By the time clever economists have raised their influential eyebrows at this and shaken their famous beards at that, the Chancellor is generally agreed to have 'done himself some good'. For one day a year, at least, the Government has the ability to dominate the domestic news agenda. At the noontide of Thatcherite triumphalism, it was a day for the unrestrained swagger. And even in these less certain times, Budget day means that someone is in charge, someone can change things, someone knows where he's going.

It is, in brief, a day when politics, theatrical and manipulative, can declare its dominance over a mundane year's-worth of prices, productivity and employment. We know, after so many brilliant budgets and so much economic decline, that this is wild Canute-like hubris. But it is oddly comforting, nevertheless.

The Budget is one national institution which changes, which passes from hand to hand, but whose lustre has seemed to survive, undimmed by the standing of any of its transient mouthpieces. Pater and Mater cannot, any longer, gaze fondly at their brood and speculate that they will grow up to be admirals, missionaries or global tycoons. But they can still dream, surely, that little Johnny or sharp-eyed Susan will one day waggle William Gladstone's briefcase and deliver a Budget?

Or can they? This November's merger of the (taxing) Budget and the (spending) autumn statement is intended to make the event more important. It will be a grander event, but it will not necessarily make the Chancellor a grander person. It is already clear that it will be impossible to keep spending arguments involving the whole Cabinet separate from private Treasury discussions about tax-raising. This subject has been raised pretty forcibly in Cabinet. The Treasury will resist the erosion of its unique power, but the Treasury will be too late. Spending and getting are one issue: having admitted it publicly, the Chancellor can hardly deny it around the Cabinet table. Further, the coincidence of the pre-Budget period and the Tory conference will make it hard to keep the already-violated doctrine of the silent Chancellor, or purdah. Stripped of his veil, he will seem less exotic.

These structural changes are important. But even more so are the political effects of the last few years on the status of the Budget. Will any Chancellor be able, ever again, to speak with the sublime self-assurance of late-period Nigel Lawson? Will not Norman Lamont's speculations about economic recovery be treated more sceptically than any of his predecessors'? Don't we now understand too much about the relative potency of national politics and world economics to be taken in by a day's theatricals, however enjoyable?

So this is a year for Mr Lamont to produce a slightly different kind of Budget speech, and for the rest of us to judge him by different standards. What has been missing in recent years is a firm sense of political purpose, based on a clear-eyed grasp of economic reality and conveyed in plain English. What the country wants most to hear has nothing to do with VAT rates or Treasury forecasts, and everything to do with our place in the world and the Government's sense of our future.

Imagine if the Chancellor devoted much of his speech to a sober assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the British economy. Imagine if he tried to paint an impartial picture - yes, here we have failed as a country and Government, here we are doing rather well, here we must rethink. Imagine if he dared to discuss the leaked industrial audit commissioned by his friend Michael Heseltine. Imagine if, having eaten enough humble pie to show that he was serious, he then spoke mainly of the long-term - about how, over the course of a decade, he thought we could push more youngsters towards industry and commerce; about where the national infrastructure was weak and needed mending; about what size he thought government ought to be, and what it ought to be doing by the end of the decade.

That sort of helmsman's speech would necessarily include plenty of stuff about the shorter-term too, above all about the deficit. But it would be worth more than the brief, tricksy illusion of control implied by a penny on this, and a sheaf of unreliable graphs.

It will be immediately objected that this is not Mr Lamont's job. He is the technician, and the Budget, however jolly, is a technical affair. Well, if the job is too big for a Chancellor, why should not the new- style Budgets be preceded by an audit of the country's affairs by the real helmsman, the Prime Minister? And the Budget was not a technical affair originally - the historian Peter Clarke, writing in the Independent yesterday, called Gladstone's Budget speeches 'a way of getting the nation to sit in judgement on itself'. That is what we need most this afternoon. That is how we should judge what we get.