LOOK, I can’t claim to understand how budgets work. I barely comprehend my own. I squint at the banking app and look away until my wife sidles over with a quaver of concern in her voice.

I trust my wife on finances more than I trust myself; and I trust the chancellor Rachel Reeves more than all those misogynistic twerps calling her Rachel From Accounts.

And I trust Reeves more than Nigel Farage, Kemi Badenoch or the editors of the usual suspect national newspapers that disparage or despise anything and everything this Labour government does.

Oh, and I definitely trust her more than Chris Mason, the BBC’s weaselly political editor.

The budget was in the headlines for days on end. This was mostly thanks to a whipped-up delirium of headlines claiming that Reeves had ‘lied’ about the state of the nation’s finances as predicted by the Office for Budget Responsibility.

That set the outrage wind machine turning. Imagine, if you will, a giant film-set fan blowing angry hot air. Or that wind symbol found on old maps, a man with puffed red cheeks from time spent in bars, hiding a hernia got from lifting boxes heavy with weighted facts.

As for Mason, he fidgeted away doing what he always does, which is to amplify whatever the usual suspect newspapers peddled that morning. Without their biased bellowing, he wouldn’t know where to start or what to say.

After a working life spent in and around the inky sheets, I don’t always find it easy to face up to what newspapers are – or some of them, at least.

But the worst newspapers are little more than propaganda machines, aren’t they? Sure, readers who still buy them may do so for various honest reasons. The sport, the crossword, the features, the recipes, whatever.

But those squawking front pages? They are battering rams filled with boiling oil (to mix the medieval siege engine metaphors).

The Mail and Telegraph, backed often by the Times and the much diminished Express, were outraged that Sir Keir Starmer won the election. And since that unexpected victory, all they have done is campaign to undermine Labour.

Now you might well think, what has Starmer done to deserve our support. And that’s the hole he has planted himself in. He’s loathed by the usual suspects; and those who should show him a little love are too often put off by the way he behaves.

Much as Donald Trump types his social media posts in capital letters, raging with incoherent capitals as the light fades, the Mail clutches its fake pearls and caps up the word SOCIALIST in headlines.

Meanwhile those who might like a socialist government fall off their chair at the notion of Starmer being a socialist.

Personally, it is Labour’s immigration policies that put me off the most, too closely shaped as they are in imitation of Farage and Reform UK. Labour makes the same shoddy mistake of assuming that most of the country’s problems are down to migrants crossing the channel in small boats.

Aside from that, I’d say Starmer, however unpopular in the moment, deserves to see out his time. Otherwise we’re allowing ourselves to be governed by short-term panic, political in-fighting and the shouting of loud-mouthed opportunists such as Farage (who hates the Tories – oh, look, he just told the FT that a deal/stich-up with the Tories is inevitable).

And what of those budget ‘lies’? Prof David Miles from the OBR later told MPs he did not believe the chancellor was being misleading about the state of the public finances. His statement undermined everything in those newspaper headlines. The apologies to Rachel Reeves were hard to find, unsurprisingly.

And the budget lifted 450,000 children out of poverty, protected renters’ rights, boosted earnings for the lowest paid, and the markets reacted well. So that’s all good. Although I have slipped in my own lie there. You know, I honestly don’t understand what the markets are, what they do and why we are always so in thrall to whatever it is they do.

And the BBC and that Mr Mason? Oh, the BBC should report impartially rather than pretending to do so while in fact reheating whatever stew of hostility has been sitting for too long on the headline hotplate.

The newspapers might be dwindling, certainly in print, but the influence the Mail and the Telegraph have over the BBC shows the lasting extent of their power. Oh, and the owners of the Mail are in the process of buying the Telegraph. Two haters for the price of one.

FARAGE FOOTNOTE: Nigel Farage said the budget was “great for you if you are a Somalian with 20 children”. That’s quite the racist statement from a man who swears he’s not a racist. He will, for sure, continue to duck and dive like this, insisting he is not what his own mouth and behaviour prove him to be.