Culture writer Adam Bloodworth tried to watch the Budget 2026 in full. Here’s how that went, with all the excruciating detail

I am an alien in the City AM office. While the other journalists concern themselves with taxation and business rates, I am writing about theatre and restaurants. City AM’s tagline is ‘business with personality,’ and, humblebrag alert, I suppose I’m the personality. 

By and large, politics and business is left off our pages – we like to take the reader away from their desks to somewhere more fabulous. And while important conversations take place over dinner, we’re concerned with telling you what to eat, where to go, and, crucially, who to put on the invite list. 

And so it was new for me this year to sit through the entirety of the Budget – not just have it on in the background, but properly take it in. Here’s this lifestyle writer’s takeaways from the Autumn Budget 2026.

Call me a fish out of water, flailing desperately for validation in City AM’s hallowed towers.

Budget 2026: I started with giant ambitions

I take all this in. I can definitely take all this in. It’s basically an hour off work: watching a man deliver a speech about how he’s going to change the country. I’m sure my parents must have sat down, like millions of others around the country, as a form of national service, to listen intently to this twice-annual sermon, only for the viewing experience to turn sour after about four-and-a-half minutes, when I had my first intrusive thought about pizza. All my hopes are quickly dashed. My mind wandering has caused me to lose the flow, and I’ve mucked this up, already. I thought I’d have at least 12 minutes in me. I can’t believe how quickly this has happened.

This isn’t going to work

This is too much information. Like, if ten minutes of someone talking fairly quickly without pausing feels like a lot of information, this is more than six times that. I really like Louis Theroux, but when I saw him say some fascinating things at How The Light Gets In festival this summer, I found myself thinking about pizza again. Sixty minutes is a long time. This is hopeless.

New approach

“You learn which bits to focus on!” my journo friend hollers from across the desk, shifting his headphones when he notices me in trouble. I can tell he’s half-zoned-out too, as he noticed me in the first place. This sounds good, and it kind of works. I tune in and have some Budget 2026 takeaways, like how “half of our shops, restaurants and gyms will pay no business rates at all”, but at other times it is still hopeless. By the time I’ve tuned back into the discourse, the Chancellor has sped ahead and moved onto something else. I feel useless, and dumb, like a stupid dumb baby. 

Maybe that’s enough?

But I did learn something. I learned about founders’ relief and first time buyer ISAs and how we’re going to get 4p off gherkins, which loyal readers will know I’m very excited about. I did learn something. A lot, actually. Now I can relay this new skill to other life situations when friends bore me to tears tell me about their lives.

The pantomime stuff is

I know I’m the gazillionth person to say this, but how are ordinary people supposed to relate to the Budget 2026, and politics in general, when everyone in the Commons is literally making noises like a cow? Not to mention all the pointing and jeering, and making sassy comments. Deputy speaker Nursat Ghani told MPs they were behaving like their children, but she wasn’t much better, clapping back at one MP’s Budget rebuttal by telling him he’d “have to write yourself a prescription just to calm down”. It was one of a handful of panto villain remarks. She told another talkative MP: “I think you’ve spoken more words than the Chancellor during this statement.” It’s funny in the sense that Ghani has good comic timing, but tragic in that this Budget is affecting people’s lives and it seems like making cow noises and cracking jokes takes precedence over the politics.

The Budget 2026 is published online anyway

Don’t sweat it: everything’s published online, on the government website, minutes after the Budget 2026 speech is delivered in the Commons. So you can sit down and read it like a slow, wise old tortoise. I’d insert something here about how that’s what happens in politics anyway – everything takes forever and no one gets anything done, etcetera etcetera – but that would require me having taken in more of the Budget than I did, so I’ll just end this here. My head hurts.