You could feel the green shoots emerge on the Tory benches. After four long years of flatlining, of having to sit through fiscal debates with long faces and serious looks, they were newly expansive. Bullish. If they weren’t quite surging, you could feel the sap rising.

For the first time since the coalition was formed, Tory MPs could sit in a budget debate and tell themselves they had done something important and right.  All those unpleasant votes, all those times in the division lobbies voting through cuts, or being called heartless and cruel. This was what it was all for. Britain is growing again, and it is down to their tough decisions. Their steady hand on the tiller.

Was the budget good? Bad? Indifferent? It mattered little. Do Tory MPs really believe that encouraging pensioners to spend their pension pot quickly is a good idea? I’m sure they can convince themselves they can.

After all, it sounds like a tax cut. If it causes a problem, it’ll be in twenty years time, as the money spent next year on cruises and new cars isn’t there to pay for energy bills. It feels good now, and will be an easy sell to disgruntled near retirees.

The same goes for bingo, beer and breaking the fuel escalator. Neither of the first two tax cuts are significant. Taxing one form of gambling more harshly to subsidise another is neither here nor there, and a penny off the pint won’t make any difference to all but the most dedicated dipsomaniac. As for the fuel duty escalator, it now rises so infrequently it must be maintained by London Underground.

Will these transform the cost of living crisis? Not a bit of it. But they sound like the sort of things Tory chancellors do when times are good, so they were cheered.

Another thing confident chancellors do is set traps. Osborne set two. One on a welfare cap and another on enshrining budgetary responsibility. Labour will be smart enough to not jump in to the trap, but will then face the problem of how to pay for all the nice things we want to do while limiting the money we have to spend.

Cynical, childish politics? Of course. But that’s what confident chancellors enjoy.

Naturally, there were some positives amidst the posturing. Support for business investment is a good idea, and even though there are better ways to help working families than an increase in tax thresholds, most people will welcome even a little extra real income when wages are not rising.

Mostly though, this was a backslap of a budget, built for the base. Osborne mentioned the hard work still to come, but the reality of what the next government will have to do was carefully ignored.

Want to understand how we can possibly reduce spending by the amount needed to hit the boasts of falling deficits after the election? You’ll find no answers in the budget documents.

For the chancellor and his troops, this year and next are a brief respite.

There has been pain for the last five years, and there will be pain for five more years. The reality of Britain’s fiscal situation demands this. Yet for an hour or so, Osborne could ignore what really lies ahead, lull us with a pause in pain, and offer a few small reliefs to ease our condition and encourage us to spend.

In the meantime, the economy grows, and the best off do very well. If the Tories can convince the British people that Labour can’t be trusted with the recovery, they may well do better yet.

Perhaps that’s why when Ed Miliband rose to speak, he found himself by a species thought extinct, but that had merely hibernated through three long harsh winters. Yes, there they were, the lesser-spotted ‘budget brayers’, loudly saluting the return of growth.

The British people will see through this, I think. The gap between proposition and reality is too wide. The rhetoric is for the working family, the reality is for the wealthy few. Yet if the Tories are beginning to believe then the left must redouble our efforts to be believed.

Let them congratulate themselves. It will avail them nothing, so long as we can offer people something better.