Paper Monitor
10:38 UK time, Wednesday, 23 June 2010
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
The budget has hit Paper Monitor hard. Not the tax rises or the public spending cuts, as such.
No, it's the awful realisation that what used to be called the posh people's papers are pitched a long, long way above Paper Monitor's station.
Blame the VAT hikes for this acute bout of status anxiety, as the former broadsheets provide their readers with a reckoner of how much their kind of consumer products will increase in cost from 4 January.
The Times offers such examples as a Eames chair and stool from department store Heal's (£4,587 to £4,685.60), the tasting menu at Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck restaurant (£150 to £153.19) and, of course, an iPad (£599.99 to £612.77).
Similarly, the Guardian suggests a sumptuous-looking three-seater leather sofa (£2,995 to £3,058.79), a cashmere men's suit (£499 to £509.63), a pair of skinny jeans (£60 to £61.28).
Paper Monitor feels like an undernourished urchin, nose pressed to the glass of an expensive restaurant - the Fat Duck in Berkshire, say - watching the iPad-toting, cashmere-suited elite fill their bellies with sous-vide delicacies until their skinny jeans fit no longer.
No, it's the Daily Mirror which comes closest to pitching at Paper Monitor's typical spending habits, highlighting a pint of lager (£3.25 to £3.32), a packet of Benson and Hedges Gold King Size (£5.98 to £6.11) and - we're all allowed our guilty pleasures - a Lady Gaga CD (£8.95 to £9.14).
But if it has been a bad budget for Paper Monitor's social pretentions, it has been a good one for the chancellor's reputation among columnists. Ann Treneman of the Times says that "Boy George has become a man". Quentin Letts of the Daily Mail postulates that Mr Osborne's "public persona is not overfrieghted by charm but there is no denying the boldness of his moves".
Even Simon Hoggart of the Guardian - no doubt reclining on his £2,995 three-seater leather sofa - even allows himself to concede grudgingly:
"George Osborne wasn't all bad, though I still find that if you close your eyes while listening, you think you're hearing Ann Widdecombe."
It's all right for some. Paper Monitor needs a B&H.
The 
