When I was a nipper my uncle gave me a £5 Premium Bond. As I recall, his thinking was that if the Good Lord wanted to be bountiful it would be a shame if he could only arrange it by having my mother, or similar, ironed out in an accident so I could scoop the insurance.
Later I gave my mother-in-law a £5 bond for the same reason. Within a year she had won £100, gave me a bottle of malt whisky and herself a rather good picture that I still covet. It’s madness to buy lottery tickets but almost every month Ernie has good news for me. I know it’s not really good news because Ernie sends an operative to knock on the door for big wins. Premium Bonds were introduced by Macmillan in 1957 and Kenneth Rose was there.
17th April 1956.
To House of Commons to hear Macmillan’s first budget. As usual, I find a note saying Daily Worker on my seat. So I sit on it. Great comings and goings. Clarissa Eden in a smart hat, Winston tottering in and out, those two clowns, Nabarro and Thornton-Kemsley, in tall hats, and Butler with a ghastly smile on his face.
Macmillan’s opening five minutes barely hold the attention of the House – an elaborate compliment to Winston, whose Budget was the first he ever heard, followed by an Oxford Union sustained comparison between a Budget day and a prize day at school. Much of the speech is contrived – presumably to provide a little luxurious literary allusion as well as a Gobi Desert of economics. Many quotations from Dickens and Macaulay.
As a Budget, it is fairly harmless. His proposal to encourage savings by a bond lottery scheme will meet with much opposition. A pity he also tried to appease the Socialists by putting yet more tax on company profits, both distributed and undistributed. Small increase in tobacco tax probably not enough.
It’s not unusual for something new to be pooh-poohed. When PEPs were introduced by Lawson in 1987 they were thought to be a gimmick. Now many long-term investors in PEPs, now called ISAs, are sitting on a million plus portfolio. I am not amongst them yet but every little grain of sand counts. It’s in Italian ‘cos Robert and I are getting in the groove for a jaunt in that direction.
Grazia molto Christopher, Tante auguri, Anna xx