Budget 2015: enough to save day for Tories? Don’t bank on it

George Osborne's ‘big rabbit’ – or, at least, medium-sized one - turned out to be the abolition of tax on the first £1,000 of interest earned on savings – an apparent boon to pensioners and those approaching pension age and a clear temptation to vote Tory.

But within minutes of Osborne sitting down after his Budget speech, Radio 4’s Money Box programme was calculating that to earn £1,000 from a typical easy access account paying 1.4 per cent interest, you’d have to have £70,000 in savings. In short, only the well-off would benefit.

Still, Osborne clearly tried to address the widespread feeling among voters – well put by Lord Aschroft in a pre-Budget commentary this morning – that the Conservative party is not on their side.

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The Chancellor had an upbeat account of how things were going to get better – “Britain’s walking tall again” - and he had a range of small goodies aimed at various sections of society: the rise in the tax threshold to £11,800, the tax-free savings, a penny off a pint, the new ‘help-to-buy’ ISA, the infrastructure pledges for areas beyond London.

• Budget summary: the highlights of Osborne's speech

But the view in Westminster was that not one of the measures felt big and bold enough to transform voters’ perceptions and give the Tories the boost in the polls they desperately need with only seven weeks to go before the general election.

Osborne was, it transpires, labouring under at least one restriction imposed by the Prime Minister after a bruising row with Cameron, backed by Tory election strategist Lynton Crosby: he was forced to ease the cuts in public spending penciled in for 2020.

Cameron and Crosby feared Ed Miliband was doing real damage to the Tories by warning that public services would be cut to levels not seen since the 1930s. Tory insiders said Labour's attack - fuelling public fears that the Tories were looking after their rich friends but would slash and burn public services - was proving toxic.

So Osborne announced that while £30bn in cuts in public spending would go ahead, they would be achieved by reducing welfare spending by £12bn, tax evasion by £5bn and only £13bn would be achieved by cuts in the budgets of the key spending departments.

This means that the level of public spending as a proportion of GDP will be reduced to the levels when Tony Blair was in office in 2000, Osborne was able to say.

Nevertheless, the independent Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) warned today that there will be “a much sharper squeeze on real spending in 2016-17 and 2017-18 than seen over the past five years”.

In a highly political Budget, Osborne tried to shoot a line of Labour foxes. He adjusted the figures to answer Labour's charge that most working families will be £1,600 worse off compared to 2010. He said that when measured by real household disposable income, they will be £900 better off.

He also announced the restriction of tax allowances on lifetime pension savings from £1.25m to £1m. This was a well-trailed Labour plan - Ed Balls was going to use the money to pay for cutting student fees from £9,000 a year to £6,000. Now Balls has a big hole in his own budget calculations.

The ‘help to buy’ ISA unveiled today appeared to answer the criticism that not enough is being done to help young people get on the housing ladder. It will give first-time buyers a bonus from the Treasury of up to £3,000 if they save £12,000. The trouble is, that won't go far in today’s housing market.

Ed Miliband, who for once made a good fist of his instant response to Osborne in the Commons, majored on the OBR’s prediction of tough times to come and on the glaring omission of any extra funding for the health service – or indeed any mention of the NHS - in the Chancellor’s speech.

Referring to those voters who have yet to feel the benefits of economic recovery, he called it the “Budget that people won’t believe from a government that is not on their side”.

Osborne has certainly gone some way towards to securing the pensioner vote – and given the greater likelihood of older people turning out to vote on polling day, it could be enough to make a difference.

But in the year of the 200th anniversary of Waterloo, this election still looks likely to be a "close run thing".