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Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots as Spectator' daily political podcast. I'm Katie Balls,

and today I'm joined by a panel of free people in the shape of Fraser Nelson, James Forsyth and Kate Andrews,

and it is Budget Day. We've just heard from Rishi Sunak, and we have been presented with the biggest

tax-raising budget since Norman the month's final

budget. He was sacked a couple of months later. James does the same await Rishi Sunak?

I doubt it. He's toast, doesn't he, Jim?

No, I thought what was interesting about this budget was how it went bigger, both in terms of of support with the furlough scheme being extended

all the way out until the end of September but also bigger on tax rises corporation tax going

up to 25p in 2023 lots of people have thought but the 25 p kite that was floating around in the

weeks leading up to the budget was designed so that when

the rate went up to 23p, say, people would be pleasantly surprised. And I think this reflects a

view on the crisis, which is the kind of Sunnack approach being to go big on spending within the

crisis in the belief that that sets the economy up for a fairly

rapid rebound once the pandemic is over. But the corporation tax hike, I think, is a sign that

he is a fiscal conservative and that he thinks that you need to do something to put public

finances on a steadier footing. As Kate writes in the magazine this week, he does worry about

the cost of servicing the debt going up and

it wouldn't need to go up that much to be problematic. And I think what is interesting in the initial

reaction is that perhaps the death of fiscal conservatism in the Tory party has been overwritten

...