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Head to octopusevo.com to get started today. Welcome to a special episode of FT Politics, the Financial Times podcast on British politics.

We're here today to discuss the 2017 budget. I'm

Sebastian Payne and I'm joined by our chief economics commentator Martin Wolf

Rupert Harrison who is portfolio manager at Black Rock and formerly Chief of Staff to George

Osborne and Miranda Green political commentator.

Thank you all for joining us, so we're going to take a quick run through Philip Hammond's first

and possibly last spring budget and what was in it.

Martin Wolf, can you begin by just giving us an overview of what the tone was like?

Philip Hammond was pretty upbeat.

He delivered it in quite a confident manner in my view and it was quite consequential changes too.

Well it was obviously as budgets tend to be very political and he was really

enjoying beating up on the Labour Party and particularly the Labour

leader who he referred to as somebody disappearing into a black hole so deep that even

Stephen Hawking couldn't pull him out I think that was the remark but I think from his point of view it was a fairly happy

event in that the news was on balance a bit better than it had been last time the

current fiscal position right now looks better. The OBR has said

this is basically because of one-offs and they haven't really changed the longer

...