NOT a good week for George, but it all seemed to start so well.

As he sat down on Wednesday, after delivering his budget speech and with the cheers of his backbenchers ringing in his ears, he must have felt pretty good – another successful budget speech as chancellor and another nail in the coffin for Boris Johnson’s leadership ambitionsleadership ambitions of Boris.

Budget statements always unravel a little but this one has unravelled faster than most.

For instead of the next day’s headlines being about the supposed strengths of the British economy, and how the chancellor’s plans for eliminating the deficit were still on track, the experts (including the respected independent Institute for Fiscal Studies) all weighed in to say that his figures looked more than optimistic and that austerity was set to continue for years to come.

But this was almost the least of his problems.

Surely he could not have been surprised by the furore that greeted his proposal to simultaneously cut taxes for the wealthy and cut benefits for disabled people, with much of the opposition coming from fellow Tory MPs.

The tax on sugary drinks was welcome, but why impose it on the manufacturers who can afford to employ clever accountants to advise them as how to avoid it, as opposed to the usual way of taxing retail goods – at the point of sale, where it can’t be avoided?

And why, at a time when petrol prices are at a low and global warming has never been more apparent, did he not take the opportunity of raising the fuel duty, which would have both helped him balance the country’s books and do a tiny bit for the environment?

Perhaps the oddest part of his budget statement was when he strolled completely off-piste to announce that all schools in England would have to leave local authority control and become academies by 2020.

Whatever you think of academies, and in my experience there are some good ones and some not so good ones, how come such an announcement was made in a budget statement? I must have missed the announcement that Osborne had been named education secretary, as well as chancellor.

And why was it appropriate to also announce that the school day would, for most children, be extended by an hour a day? Has anyone spoken to the heads, the teachers or parents about this?

It might turn out to be a good idea, but such changes should not be produced like rabbits out of a chancellor’s hat.

Of course there is another agenda in play. By ending local authorities’ responsibility for schools the chancellor would be drastically reducing their powers while, at the same time, significantly increasing the role of central government.

One of the more indefensible aspects of these proposed changes is that school governing bodies need no longer contain any parent governors.

Removing schools from local government control means that no local councillors will sit on governing bodies. If parents are also excluded, who will schools be accountable to? The answer is representatives of business, religion and central government – I don’t remember voting for that.

It’s very odd that a Conservative government, usuallysupposedly committed to reducing the power of the state, has, by this one move, substantially increased it. Academies are directly answerable to the Department for Education and so the chancellor’s announcement represents creating a national schools service, which no doubt will end up facing the same problems of underfunding as the National Health Service.

Perhaps the budget’s biggest failing is that despite announcing headline-grabbing cuts in tax for those at the top and bottom of the scale, the overall effect of the budget was to increase taxes to the highest level imposed by a Conservative chancellor since the late 1980s and higher than in all-but-one of Gordon Brown’s 10 years at the Treasury.

So the verdict on the chancellor’s budget is ‘could do better’ and don’t just take my word for it.

The latest YouGov poll shows that for the first time for George Osborne, more people thought his budget was unfair than fair. So it’s probably no surprise that, also for the first time, the same poll put Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party ahead of the Conservatives.

As I said, not a good week for George.

  • Ivor Gaber is professor of journalism at the University of Sussex and a former political correspondent based in Westminster.