You'll be reading a lot of stuff about the Budget this morning (my favourite in the evening papers: "Drinkers hammered". I mean, I'm not exactly in favour of the 14p on a bottle of wine or the 55p on a bottle of whisky - but compared to a fiver for the vino and the difficulty of finding a decent scotch for less than twenty quid, it's not exactly putting the British boozer into the same league as Norway or Iceland).

But one thing really jars - the repeated comments that this is Alistair Darling's first Budget. There was the pre-Budget report in November, the subsequent announcement that the capital gains tax proposals would be looked at again, the non-dom fiasco and, of course, the sudden increase in public spending to the tune of several tens of billions in order to buy a Geordie bank. So with all the major tax and spending announcements made in the last few months, was this really his first Budget?

Then again, given the 2p cut in the rate of income tax that was actually announced a year ago, was this Darling's first Budget - or Gordon Brown's last?

* One green note: nice to see that the Chancellor who is threatening to tax plastic carriers out of existence decided to reuse Gladstone's old bag to present the Budget rather than the flashier one that his predecessor used. Or maybe he just didn't want to be seen as Gordon Brown's bag carrier.