It’s time to watch your back

PHILIP Hammond is going to have to produce a budget that would make Imelda Marcos’s shoeshine bill look modest, or it could be kicking his heels himself.

Michael Gove is circling the treasury, this time aiming not to shoot himself as well as his intended carrion.

The budget winners have already been decided.

Northern Ireland, obviously, but Scottish Tory MPs can hardly contain their smugness over their apparent influence on Theresa May, which will produce a few crumbs from the table. Nonetheless, a freeze in whisky duty and VAT exemption on emergency services, a hole dug by the SNP, are good crumbs.

There ought to be enough for the 12 to lord it over the 35 for a day.

Auditions for junior ministerial promotion came this week in the guise of a tedious Westminster Hall debate on a second referendum.

Only Tommy Sheppard livened it up, pretending to have a trigger finger on the second vote.

Tommy is on what the Tories call the rubber chicken circuit, going around constituency associations on a speaking tour. The stovie circuit perhaps?

That should be enough to put Ian Blackford on high alert that other auditions are under way too.

The SNP Westminster leader was this week put on the Commons Intelligence and Security committee keeping an eye on Britain’s spies. But he’ll have to watch his back too, or it might be a case of who kilt Blackford?

Who kilt, geddit? Och, never mind it’s been a long week.