I MUST have been seven when I first discovered the demonic powers of a man called the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Without warning, one evening he turned teatime in our household, usually a jolly occasion, into a tense, eyes cast down, mechanical chewing, hair-trigger affair when the BBC Home Service reported on something called The Budget and Dad hit the roof.

What specifically incurred his wrath I don't recall, but for some years I actually believed 'a budget' was a cross between the antichrist and bubonic plague, and automatically prefixed by the word 'bloody'.

As that first Budget memory was in 1956, research shows the relevant b�te noir was Harold Macmillan, a man who once told the nation we'd never had it so good. How the decades have flown, spanned by such dullards as Callaghan, Maudling, Clarke and Brown, to Wee George who tells us we're all in it together.

Exactly how long did it take smirking George to devise the law of transferable inequalities?

Like a nervous fourth former on his debating society debut, he recited the leaked contents of the previous week's front pages and then, having failed miserably to control public spending, slipped in his cowardly assault on pensioners when he thought they'd all be dozing.

To suggest the elderly are fair game because they've so far got off lightly, misses the point.

They've paid their dues, coughed up many times over for the incompetent gimmickry of George and his predecessors, paid taxes all their lives and then iniquitously been taxed again on any pittances they've managed to put aside; assuming, of course, anything's left since Brown raided the pension funds, and quantitative easing and joke interest rates devalued their savings.

Isn't it enough threatening to seize their houses, leaving them dying of thirst in hospital or being brutalised in a bankrupt care home?

Meanwhile, voting on George's masterplan will be those models of rectitude, our honourable MPs, who've just persuaded Parliamentary watchdog IPSA that those peskily embarrassing expenses receipts which caused them such bother in 2009 must in future remain secret.

And the only thing worse than finding there's no smoke without a pricey seat in front of Dave's fire, or watching a raddled looking, reptilian Lord Mandelson being sanctimonious about it, is discovering that apparently the alternative to sleazy bungs is to have political parties publicly funded.

No prizes for guessing which mugs provide public funds.

If St Peter takes tea with my Dad these days, I hope he's got ear plugs.