2nd October 2026
There could hardly be a better night for the BBC to bring back The Celebrity Traitors.
Twenty-one celebrities have entered the Scottish castle, where nobody knows who can be trusted and everybody is wondering who will be the next to disappear.
And just four weeks later, on 28 October, Chancellor John Healey will enter his own rather less glamorous castle: the Treasury.
There will be no Claudia Winkleman, no dramatic cloaks and probably considerably less swearing.
But there will be a Budget.
And if recent economic news is anything to go by, there could be quite a few Traitors hiding in the corridors.
The first problem for the Chancellor is identifying them.
Traitor No. 1: Inflation
Inflation looks innocent enough.
It has been falling.
Then it comes back.
It was 3.1% in August, well above the Bank of England's 2% target, and rising fuel prices are making life particularly difficult.
Inflation therefore gets the first invitation to the castle.
It has one simple strategy:
Make everything more expensive and blame somebody else.
Food prices?
Not me.
Diesel?
Definitely not me.
Heating oil?
I wasn't even here.
Traitor No. 2: The Bond Market
This one is much harder to spot.
It doesn't appear on supermarket shelves.
It doesn't send you a bill.
It simply sits quietly in the financial markets and decides how much the Government has to pay to borrow money.
Unfortunately for the Chancellor, gilt yields have been rising.
Which means the Government can announce billions of pounds of spending and then discover that the financial markets would quite like to charge interest on it.
The bond market's defence would probably be:
“I didn't raise your borrowing costs. I merely priced the risk.”
Very suspicious.
Traitor No. 3: Diesel
Diesel doesn't even need a cloak.
At around £2 a litre, everybody knows it is in the castle.
The problem is that diesel doesn't just attack motorists.
It attacks lorries.
And lorries attack supermarket prices.
And delivery costs.
And building materials.
And almost everything else that has to travel around Britain.
The real trick is that diesel doesn't need to murder the economy in one episode.
It can simply make everything slightly more expensive for long enough.
Traitor No. 4: Government Borrowing
This contestant is particularly dangerous because it looks respectable.
The Government borrows money.
The Government spends money.
The Government collects taxes.
And then somebody discovers that the Government has borrowed rather more than expected.
The Chancellor's job is to find the culprit.
Unfortunately, the culprit appears to be sitting in the Treasury accounts.
Traitor No. 5: The 2% Inflation Target
This one has been particularly good at hiding.
It has been hiding for years.
Every time somebody thinks they have found it, food prices, energy prices or fuel prices suddenly turn up and say:
“Round here, we don't do 2%.”
And then there is the Faithful
The Faithful contestant in this particular game might be called Economic Growth.
Because despite all the gloom, Britain is still growing.
GDP increased in the second quarter and again in the three months to July.
GDP per head has also been increasing.
Real wages have started to rise.
Britain is not in recession.
That makes Economic Growth one of the few contestants who can honestly say:
“I haven't betrayed you.”
Unfortunately, the other contestants are making it rather difficult to notice.
The Chancellor enters the round table
So imagine the scene on 28 October.
John Healey sits at the round table.
Around him are Inflation, Borrowing, Diesel, Debt, Public Spending, Interest Rates and Economic Growth.
The Chancellor looks around the table.
“Who are the Traitors?”
Silence.
Inflation looks innocent.
Debt looks offended.
Diesel says nothing.
The bond market simply raises its yield.
The Chancellor turns to Economic Growth.
“Can you help?”
Economic Growth replies:
“I'm doing my best.”
And somewhere in the background, the Treasury calculator quietly runs out of battery.
But there is one important difference
Unlike the television programme, the Budget has no prize of £100,000 for the last person standing.
The prize is much bigger.
And so is the bill.
The Chancellor has promised that his 28 October Budget will be built around fiscal discipline and will meet the Government's fiscal rules.
That means the real game is not simply about finding money.
It is about deciding where the money comes from, where it goes and who ultimately pays for it.
Taxes?
Spending cuts?
Borrowing?
Growth?
Or a mixture of all four?
There will be plenty of people trying to work out which measures have been quietly selected before the Chancellor walks into Parliament.
And unlike Celebrity Traitors, there will be no Claudia Winkleman to tell us who has been chosen.
We will have to wait for the red Budget box.
Then, finally, the Traitors will reveal themselves.
Or perhaps, like the best television series, there will be a few surprises.
Either way, 28 October could be the biggest round table of the year.