The much-awaited annual Budget announcement tomorrow has been postponed for two weeks, after it emerged that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, had misplaced his calculator.
Senior Conservative figures had said that the Budget would be a "day of reckoning" for the government, but Mr Darling said that, without his instrument of calculation, no 'reckoning' would be possible.
Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, offered Mr Darling his ready reckoner - a handbook of tables used to facilitate computation, but the latter refused, telling his opposite number:
"It's alright, thank you."
Numbers are strange things to work out, and if you're not very clever, you can get into a right old muddle! Mr Darling, who positively relies on his calculator to get things right, hasn't got a clue about arithmetic, and therefore decided to re-arrange the Budget for 14 days from tomorrow.
That's, hang on, the 22nd ... plus 14, that's er ... the 36th April.
