Politicians have failed to prepare the public for the scale of the impending squeeze on living standards, Business Secretary Vince Cable has admitted.

At big moments it's not unusual to get a little nostalgic and look for parallels with the past.

That may be the end of the PM's lordly ease at the dispatch box. It was a lovely act while it lasted. Week by week we had an exhibition from another era as Cameron showed us the upper-class skill of manners being the art of making other people feel uncomfortable.

Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls says that taxpayers will be in for a shock when they get their next payslip.

William Hague endured heavy criticism when the Foreign Office was slow to lay on aircraft to take British citizens out of Libya, so he must be keen that the costs of other airlifts out of crisis zones are not subjected to too much scrutiny.

Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls says the Budget will hurt families and fuel prices will rise with VAT.

The media game these days is to take Ed Balls seriously, and respectfully report his economic ideas. It's harder to keep a straight face as time goes on, but the interviewers don't care – they're doing it to destabilise his struggling leader, Ed Miliband.

With the world in turmoil, global oil prices surging and the British economy faltering there is still time for George Osborne to pause before the Budget and ask himself: "Am I getting this right?"

David Cameron declared yesterday that enterprise was morally right and defended his controversial campaign to sell British-made arms to regimes around the world with poor records on democracy and human rights.

Ed Balls has called on the Government to reverse soaring fuel prices by abolishing the recent VAT rise in petrol.

It probably wasn't solely to annoy Polly that they held their poverty presser in Toynbee Hall but it must have been an incidental pleasure. Iain Duncan Smith and David Cameron announced the Tory welfare plan in that Edwardian palace of civic goodwill and self-improvement. I'm not sneering at either mind you, that's a trick you find on the professional left. But the venue was iconic, and part of the message-sending thing they enjoy doing – like Ed Balls eating the Kleinwort Benson canapes.

Ed Miliband may have ditched the New Labour label but he is finding it harder to drop the control-freak tendency which was admired and then discredited during the Blair/Brown era.