This is The Guardian.

My budget, led by this government's values of fairness and opportunity.

Listen, it's been a bad hand played in truth pretty poorly.

What Rachel needs to do this week is be labour.

Go in and put a budget in that is actually labour.

We support growth, but Rachel Reeves hasn't a rashers how to deliver growth.

This is the first budget to unravel before it's even been delivered.

If you're Chancellor, yes, you shouldn't put stupid things in your manifesto.

These are all things that we inherited and have to fix, and you can't fix it in one budget. I'm Pippa Carrera. And I'm Kieran Stacey. You're listening to Politics Weekly UK for The Guardian. Well, it's Budget Week. Finally, how many times have we sat there, Kieran, and said, it's another three weeks, it's another three weeks, it's another two weeks, it's another week, anyway, here we finally are Rachel reviews. We're standing up in front of the House of Commons and revealing all or not revealing all because we seem to know quite a lot of it already on Wednesday. But before we get onto that, Kieran, you're just back from a trip to Johannesburg, aren't you, with the Prime Minister?

Yeah, it was a very glamorous weekend I had. It was two overnight, 11-hour flights on a military run jet.

And kind of just below 48 hours on the ground, it was really whistle-stop. But yeah, we were there with the Prime Minister for the G20 Summit.

We weren't sure whether the trip was going to go ahead, even quite late with the Prime Minister for the G20 summit. We weren't sure

whether the trip was going to go ahead, even quite late into the day. Because it's so close

to the budget. So close to budget. It's an extraordinary thing I was trying to remember is, has a

prime minister ever gone away before so close to such an important domestic political event?

I mean, it is pretty unusual, although I do remember one trip to the UN General Assembly with Liz Trust in her brief premiership, where we landed back only to go straight into a budget.

In fact, the fated mini budget back in 2022 in September.

And, I mean, maybe she didn't get enough sleep on the flight or something.

Maybe she didn't, she was so busy focusing on international affairs that she, you know, signed off the wrong measures or something.

So you're saying the precedent for a prime minister travelling just before a budget is the mini budget of 2022.

What could possibly go wrong?

I think that makes the point, doesn't it?

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