Budget 2010: minute-by-minute live coverage

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It was a Budget speech unlike any other we have seen in recent years. Gordon Brown"s were always political and, in the days of plenty, he invariably had a huge giveaway tax or spend in the last few lines to send his troops away happy.

But here was his ostensibly dour successor the man who admitted that the forces of Hell were unleashed against him by No 10 for telling the truth about the recession coming out with the most electioneering display one could remember from a chancellor.

Mr Darling had nothing, or very little, to give away on this occasion. The conventions of Parliament dictate that Budget speeches do not refer directly to the Opposition parties, let alone their leading politicians. The speech is meant to be such a serious occasion that the Speaker does not allow interventions from MPs. Nothing must interrupt the flow of the nation"s bank manager.

But when Mr Darling sat down after an hour the cheers from Labour MPs were undoubtedly genuine. For a man with virtually nothing up his sleeve he had given them quite a bit to shout about.

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And he did it by being openly political and going close to tearing up the Budget Day conventions. He did it with an announcement that was also a joke. By saving to the last his pledge to crack down on tax evasion in Belize, Mr Darling gave Labour MPs their "Ashcroft moment" and they loved it.

When he added that it would come into effect within days, rather than the ten years it had taken for the Conservatives to come clean about Lord Ashcroft"s tax status, he brought the House down.

Whatever the Forces of Hell did to Mr Darling, here suddenly at the end of the Budget was the music hall comedian. The Treasury expects to make little from Belize. Nothing is forecast as a gain from that territory in the Red Book. But the facts could not get in the way of a good quip.

His big surprise announcement was also blatantly electoral in motive. Overnight it had been leaked to the broadcasters that Mr Darling would raise the starting stamp duty threshold for first-time buyers to 250,000.

Labour"s strategists had banked, rightly, that the Chancellor would get a bigger cheer for the method chosen to pay for it a super stamp duty tax on properties worth more than 1 million. It was a classic Robin Hood attack in election terms it may be seen as setting North against South but it made the Labour side feel better.

David Cameron went ahead and accused Labour of stealing his idea the help for first-time buyers but he could hardly claim to have thought up the means of paying for it.

It was a strange occasion because Mr Darling won plaudits for announcing the biggest budget deficit in history 167 billion because that grotesque figure was 11 billion lower than he had predicted in November.

Better-than-expected tax receipts and consequential lower debt interest helped him to that figure. But as Mr Cameron pointed out later, it was hardly something to gloat about.

Almost all of the Budget had that political feel.

Again without referring directly to his opponents Mr Darling"s message was that Labour"s actions from Northern Rock, to bailing out the banks, to stimulating the economy had been proved right and would not have been done had the Conservatives been in power.

Apart from the Belize joke it may be one of those Budgets whose measures, such as they were, will be quickly forgotten.

But it is Mr Darling rather than Mr Brown who has fired the election starting gun.