Putting the OBR in charge of the Budget is like letting the Pools Panel decide who wins the Premier League

Remember the Pools Panel? It was a committee of alleged experts first convened during the big freeze of 1963 to decide the football results.

back then around 14 million people religiously filled in a pools coupon, hoping to get lucky betting on the outcome of matches.

eight draws could win you a small fortune in exchange for a half-crown punt, like the celebrated Yorkshire housewife Viv Nicholson who scooped £152,000 and famously promised to ‘spend, spend, spend’.

Which she did, until she was forced to file for bankruptcy, having gone from flat broke back to boracic in double-quick order.

In the days before the National Lottery, the pools were the best chance for ordinary folk to get rich quick. Families would gather round the wireless at five o’clock every Saturday afternoon while Dad ticked off the coupon.

(There’s a wonderful old radio sketch featuring michael bentine, of the Goons, in full James Alexander Gordon mode, becoming increasingly excited as he reads the results and thinks he’s about to win big. You can still find it on the internet.)

So when the freezing weather caused the wholesale cancellation of games in January 1963, the pools companies — Littlewoods, Vernons and Zetters — decided that rather than disappoint several million paying punters they’d assemble an expert panel to predict the scores.

It included former players Tom Finney, Tommy Lawton and Ted Drake, along with rAF Group Captain Douglas bader, who lost his legs in a flying accident but went on to become a World War II hero before being shot down over France and ending up in Colditz.

Also on the panel was the flamboyant Conservative mP Sir Gerald Nabarro, best known for his Jimmy edwards-style handlebar moustache, getting arrested after driving the wrong way round a roundabout in one of his three Daimler motor cars (licence plate, NAb 1), and his colourful racist politics, which made enoch Powell sound like Nelson mandela.

THE Government is considering designating the Muslim Council of Britain an ‘extremist’ organisation. Next week, ministers will be revealing what bears do in the woods and describing the Pope as a Catholic.

LATer incarnations were to include the marquis of bath, famous for the Lions of Longleat, and the economist Lord Peston, father of ITV political pundit robert Peston.

Needless to say, some of their predictions were controversial, such as Peterborough winning away at Derby. but everyone went along with it, until normal service was resumed following the thaw in the weather that march.

by now, you’re probably wondering where I’m going with all this. bear with me. It’s about the folly of relying on ‘experts’ to predict anything.

Yes, back in 1963 I’m sure there was an outside chance of the Posh getting a result at the baseball Ground. Had the game actually been played, however, the odds would have been on Derby beating them four or five-nil.

Would you risk the chance to pay off your mortgage on a wild guess by Douglas bader and a racist Jimmy edwards lookalike? Precisely.

So why does the Chancellor of the exchequer put such great store on the views of the Office for budget responsibility (aka the Obr).

All we heard about in the runup to the budget was that Jeremy Hunt’s room for manoeuvre on tax cuts was restricted by the Obr’s forecasts on the amount of ‘headroom’ he had available. The Obr was set up by Call me Dave and boy George in 2010 to act as an ‘ independent’ financial watchdog, after Gordon brown departed from office bequeathing us ‘no money’, according to the infamous note left by one of his sidekicks at the Treasury.

I thought that was the bank of england’s job, but apparently not. Still, outsourcing financial forecasts to a quango allows ministers to evade responsibility. Which is the whole point of the exercise.

every six months, the Obr issues a report on how it thinks the economy is doing. Nine times out of ten it is hopelessly wrong. Predicting where the national debt will be in five years time is about as reliable as predicting the weather. Or the football results, come to that.

Yet successive Chancellors hide behind the Obr, as if its wild guesses are set in tablets of stone. So Hunt was able this week to claim that his hands were tied.

In which case, what’s the point of having a Chancellor, if he doesn’t make the ultimate decisions?

Putting the Obr in charge of the budget is like letting the Pools Panel decide the winners of the Premier League. Hunt might just as well have thrown a dart at a wall chart.

East Fife 5, Forfar 4.

As the bbC’s economics editor Faisal Islam said yesterday: ‘mr Hunt is not fully in charge of this budget, and his power to make people feel better off and have more money to spend is limited by the decisions of bodies outside of his control.’

The bbC would say that of a Tory Chancellor, wouldn’t they? but in this case, Islam’s not wrong.

When we voted for brexit, michael Gove gave a memorable interview in which he said the public were sick of ‘ experts’ dictating policy. Amen to that.

but eight years on from the referendum, we have made little progress in reclaiming our democracy from the unelected quangocracy.

They may not be in europe these days — apart from the appalling yuman rites court, to which even Tory politicians remain in thrall. but home-grown bodies such as the Obr and the blairite ‘Supreme Court’ continue to hold sway.

This column doesn’t really go in for budget analysis. I’ve got a better chance of guessing the football results.

but this one will be quickly forgotten and won’t shift the dial on the Conservatives’ election prospects. All you need to know is that in advance of the budget, Hunt said he’d prefer to be a taxcutting Chancellor like Nigel Lawson but was being forced (by the Obr?) to be more ‘prudent’ like Gordon brown.

In which case, we’re in even more trouble than Hunt is prepared to admit.

WHY can’t he just level with us? This isn’t just a big freeze, like the winter of 1962/63, which will thaw any time soon. britain is skint.

rishi Sunak splashed hundreds of billions on his money For Nothing And Your Chips For Free bonanza during Covid.

People got used to being paid for doing sweet FA and half of them can’t be bothered to go back to work, content to sit at home eating Hobnobs while claiming to have ‘ mental elf’ problems.

The dosh to make up for the over-generous, over- extended furlough scheme has to come from somewhere, as do the billions keeping a generation of idlers in the style to which they have become not just accustomed but to which politicians have allowed them to think they are entitled.

Like Viv Nicholson, ‘ spend, spend, spend’ has come home to roost. There’s ‘no money’ left.

And it will be worse under Labour. Shadow Chancellor ‘ martha’ reeves — did she mention she once worked for the bank of england? — hasn’t got a clue, either.

She’s dancing in the street. Just as you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, we don’t need the Obr to tell us we’re all going to hell in a handcart.

As for the uninspiring technocrat Jeremy Hunt, he might just as well have sub-contracted the budget to the Pools Panel. Like Douglas bader, he hasn’t got a leg to stand on.