Have you read your budget commentaries yet? If not, I have no wish to distract you from them.

We read in David Copperfield that Mr. Micawber was waiting for me within the gate, and we went up to his room (top story but one), and cried very much. He solemnly conjured me, I remember, to take warning by his fate; and to observe that if a man had twenty pounds a-year for his income, and spent nineteen pounds nineteen shillings and sixpence, he would be happy, but that if he spent twenty pounds one he would be miserable. After which he borrowed a shilling of me for porter, gave me a written order on Mrs. Micawber for the amount, and put away his pocket-handkerchief, and cheered up.

The man who ended up in the King’s Bench Prison had some wisdom; we read later on that Mr. Micawber was a thoroughly good-natured man, and as active a creature about everything but his own affairs as ever existed, and never so happy as when he was busy about something that could never be of any profit to him, but if I have read it correctly, even with his wisdom he still increases the level of his borrowing by one shilling.

I have no wish, as perhaps some do, to impugn the intellectual abilities of our government; to have even appeared on University Challenge is something to which the brain of this writer could not have aspired, but to have succeeded there also would have been, had it not been seen, incredible. It is entirely credible that those who are in leadership have the aptitude for it, and the intellectual ability to be busy about something of such importance.

It is perhaps then of no surprise that as Mr Micawber ignored his own wisdom, others today have ignored theirs only to borrow more with a further promise to pay the bearer on demand the extra shilling when required to do so.

E&OE If I have misunderstood the English of the dialect used by Mr Dickens, which is no longer commonly spoken in this land, then I apologise, but I carry some hope that you may comprehend with some satisfaction that a modified interpretation would not entirely invalidate the conclusion that has been drawn.