Hello, I'm Hugo Rifkin, and now we're going to be unpacking the politics of the day,

from all the budget excitement on Budget Eve Eve to whether we should listen to Mel Stride

and whether MP should accept freebies.

And joining me, two times journalists who've never been on the end of a freebie, not that you can prove anyway.

It's Charlotte Ivers.

Hello Charlotte.

Hello,

Hugo.

Thanks for being here.

And Seb Paine.

Hello, Seb.

Good morning, Hugo.

Freebies? Yeah. No. You're literally a restaurant critic, Charlotte. Isn't your whole job freebies? I mean... Someone pays for her meals. Someone pays for my meals. just not her it's the subscribers of the times and the sunday times pay for my meals and me quite

frequently because i'll quite often order so much that i go, it's probably taking the make to file that. You're embarrassed about putting the receipt in. Exactly, yeah. So. Bet Jell's Corrin never does that. I think you're probably right, but he's not here to defend himself, so I wouldn't want to. The problem of being a political journalist is that all the freebies you get are just free books. You don't get exciting travel or nice presents or bottles of gin or all the things. You know, when you go down to the Times Newsroom, on the features end of the newsroom, it's constant. Panetones, and wine, spirits, non-alcoholic spirits, the whole lot. It's a constant rotation. Just get on of it, writing about politics. I once, somehow, for reasons I don't quite understand, probably because at the time I was writing for GQ, got on the Dolcey and Gabana free underpants list. And so once a month, they'd send me a pair of extremely posh pants. It's still before the watershed, Hugo. Lost at a year, they're still in heavy rotation. We'll come back to that later. And they're getting value for money, sponsorship-wise then. Well, yeah, 10 years on. I mean, you know, if that list still exists, I'm just saying. Look, let's crack on. I want to obviously talk first of all about the budget. Because happy anniversary to Rachel Reeves. It's exactly one year today since she said this to the CBI.

I'm not coming back with more borrowing or more taxes. And that is why at this budget,

we did wipe the slate clean to put public finances and public services on a firm footing.

And as a result, we won't have to do a budget like this ever again.

Charlotte, that has aged less like fine wine and more like cheap cheese. Yeah, it's not great, isn't it? Because obviously

at the last budget, what HREs was saying to businesses is, I know that you really hate what's

going on here. But don't worry, because it's some that up on the head and this won't happen again.

And clearly, we're about to discuss the fact that that has changed. I mean, it's, it's funny,

isn't it? Because this time last year, she was raising or about to raise national insurance

...