George osborne

This will take a while to sink in - we simply have never seen this before in a Budget. George Osborne has just revolutionised the way pensions work; millions of people will have just found their pensions pot turned into a bank account. The punitive 55 per cent tax rate they faced if taking out more than they should from a pension has been abolished. And how much does this cost Osborne? That's the beauty. No wonder the Chancellor's aides were briefing that he'd found a very radical, very 'clever' policy. This will make a massive pre-election difference to pensioners, the group most likely to vote at the next election. This bung to Tory target voters will be off-radar to the IFS and Labour because those guys only compute tax and spending changes - not welfare or savings.

The continued speculation about who in the Conservative party is putting the most effort into preparing their leadership hat to throw into the currently non-existent ring is quite amusing. But it also means that those involved will struggle to have such a moral high ground when they need to lecture backbench colleagues for getting overexcited about potty-sounding leadership challenges after the European elections. Boris and George Osborne may be engaged in a strange fight about who is gaining the most currency with backbenchers so that they're in the best possible position post-Cameron, while backbench unrest will be focused on Cameron's own position.

Ed Balls has announced today that he’d scrap even the tiny tax break that George Osborne is planning to offer next year, thus drawing another dividing line with the Tories. Cameron’s proposed tax relief is not about promoting marriage, or favouring any lifestyle over another. He wants to make the government more marriage-neutral. That means eroding the bias against marriage, which is one of the most pernicious poverty traps in the British today. When I was writing for the News of the World, I was contacted by a reader who said that he loved his family, but had concluded they’d be (financially) a lot better off without him. He sent the calculations, and they were all correct.

School reform is economically essential for Britain's future success, morally necessary for a fairer, more socially mobile society and politically essential for a centre-right party that wants to show that it is about spreading privilege not defending it. This is why Michael Gove's agenda is so important to the Tories and their future success. Gove was always going to face opposition. Members of the National Union of Teachers hustled David Blunkett and his guide dog into a room and then screamed at him for merely condemning school strikes from opposition in 1995. They were, obviously, going to do far worse to a radical Tory Education Secretary.

David Cameron spoke to Barack Obama on the phone last night. That's pretty difficult to imagine, isn't it? A man on the phone. Screw up your eyes and furrow your brow all you like: you'll never quite make that mental leap to imagining what a chap on the phone really does look like. So thank goodness that the Prime Minister is there to help you out. Last night he didn't just tell us that he'd been on the phone, he tweeted out a photo of him on the phone with a Serious Phone Face. Still a bit difficult to imagine, though, isn't it? He should have added an audioboo of him talking in his Special Phone Voice. It's not the first time Cameron has helped us imagine what he looks like on the phone, though.

As James exclusively revealed on Coffee House this morning, an ambush took place at this morning's Cabinet meeting on legislation for an EU referendum and recall of MPs. Downing Street confirmed this at today's lobby briefing, with the Prime Minister's official spokesman saying that: ‘I don't think it's any secret that Conservative members of the Cabinet would want to see an EU referendum bill, and that point was made. With regard to recall, well of course we don't... try to pre-brief the Queen's speech... but the Prime Minister made clear his commitment to introducing that.

In politics, as in comedy, timing is everything. It is worth bearing this in mind when considering George Osborne’s ‘you can’t keep the pound’ speech and what has happened since. There were many (including some senior Lib Dems) who were quick to criticise the Chancellor after he ruled out a shared Sterling zone with a independent Scotland earlier this month. Alistair Carmichael, the Scottish Secretary, even went public to suggest it may well have been ‘wrong from a tactical point of view’ to goad the Nats in this way, particularly as the Yes camp received a noticeable surge in support as a result. But it now appears as if there was a clear calculating method in Osborne’s approach.