Today saw two political auditions – and two missed opportunities

Has anyone seen George Osborne’s rabbit? Last seen in SW1 at around noon today. Much discussed in today’s papers. The rabbit that would shock Labour, stun and please the electorate and send the Tories surging into the election campaign with renewed vigour. A cut in the basic rate of tax was mooted, but never came. A huge trap for Labour over welfare was rumoured, but when it came, it was a welfare cap excluding cyclical spending – a plan remarkably similar to the one Miliband proposed last year (and which Tories mocked him for, incidentally).

The big new measures that were proposed, when they came, were unremarkable at best and foolish at worst. Extending help to buy whilst decrying a nation build on unsustainable debt was nonsensical – especially as even by Osborne’s optimistic estimates only 120,000 new homes will be delivered via this measure (well below the one million minimum required in the next parliament). His “pothole plan” might be enough for a couple of London boroughs, not the UK as a whole. The personal allowance rise and the fuel tax freeze were barely announcements at all, so priced into the cost of doing politics have they become for the Chancellor.

It began to feel like the shiny new point coin – nicknamed the distraction coin – was the big news out of the budget after all. Yet little was announced that will put more pounds, of any shape or size, in the pockets of Britain’s workers.

He even dropped in a “We’re all in this together” for good measure. Just so you knew he’d still remembered how.

The coup de grace though came at the end, as Osborne was clearly pleased with himself. There was a tax free allowance for those who save up to £15,000 a year. Ask yourself – how many people can afford to save £15,000 a year? That’s more than 50% of the average UK salary. This is another giveaway for the wealthy by stealth (and even then, not a great one, as interest rates are so low). Osborne then rolled into liberalisation of pension schemes – a boost for the grey vote who he hopes will push the Tories over the line in 2015. But more than that, these two policies were clearly announced more with one eye on a future tilt at the Tory leadership contest. The grey vote and the wealthy saver – that’s the Tory selectorate, not the British people as a whole – not the makers and the strivers.

But even if we judge Osborne’s speech as a leadership tilt rather than an attempt to fix Britain’s broken economy, it fell short. Osborne’s shortcomings as a political performer are stark. He doesn’t speak well, he runs out of vocal steam quickly, he’s not the tactician he briefs that he is. In short – compared to a Boris or even (perish the thought) a Gove.

A flat speech then, and a flat budget. No game changer this. And so Labour MPs will have been expecting a powerful response from Miliband. The advantage that the Labour leader and his shadow chancellor have over their government counterparts is that they’re experienced economic minds. They should have been able to digest some of the budget detail and respond swiftly. And yet a decision had clearly been taken for Miliband to respond with a pre-prepared speech that didn’t refer directly to any of the measures announced today. It wasn’t a budget response speech, it was a single transferable economy speech that Miliband could have delivered yesterday. Or six months ago.

No mention of Osborne’s craven appeal to the Tory base and the future electorate of the Tory membership. No mockery, even, of Osborne’s biggest reveal coming overnight from the Royal Mint. No attempt to prove that this government have run out of ideas. He could have noted that growth estimates for 2016 and 2017 are not as glorious as Osborne sought to imply. He could have gone much harder on Osborne’s failure to match his own deficit reduction plan. But opportunities to go off script and ad-lib were frustratingly spurned.

It was clearly planned. It was clearly intended to avoid any hostages to fortune before sober analysis of the full budget red boo had taken place. But it such a lack of risk taking seems unlikely to place Osborne precisely where he should be right now – on the back foot.

What Miliband’s speech did do was whack the Tories for their failure to deliver for working people – and rightly so – but a speech without a single reference to the budget that we’d all listened to for almost an hour seemed remiss. Miliband is sharp enough to know what was wrong with that budget. Likewise Balls. So why they didn’t choose to show that is a real conundrum.

Today we saw two political auditions for starring roles – Osborne for party leader and Miliband for Prime Minister. Both were clearly calibrated to hoover up support from those they want to vote for them in 2015. But both men will need to do better if they’re to get the jobs they aspire to. Osborne’s failure to deliver on the hype around his budget will not have gone unnoticed, but neither will Miliband’s failure to directly address the measures outlined by the Chancellor in today’s budget.

Now Labour and Miliband must show that their tactic wasn’t in vain, and begin thrashing through the detail of the budget to identify and pounce on Osborne’s weaknesses. The first opportunity has been missed, and the clock in ticking.

Update: Isabel Hardman reports over at The Spectator on the Ed Balls post-budget briefing, and has an interesting quote from the Shadow Chancellor on Labour’s response:

“Ed Miliband had written pages of his speech which weren’t used in the end because they referred to things that might be in there but weren’t and, so, you know, he obviously had to fill the space by going on and on about Michael Gove’s comments…’”

That puts some of what I wrote earlier into perspective. Labour sources this afternoon have all been saying that they expected a rabbit to be pulled out of Osborne’s hat today. It never appeared.