A joke that backfired So that's the Chancellor – but what of the Budget? Well, the word itself started out as a satirical joke. It's a corruption of the medieval French word for a doctor's bag, and it was in the early 18th Century that sneering journalists and cartoonists began to caricature politicians as quack doctors reaching into their "budgets" for instant financial remedies for the nation's ills. The satire backfired as the word became accepted political jargon, and eventually entered common usage for any financial matter (such as your own personal weekly budget). Red box The details of each year's Budget are outlined in the Chancellor's Budget speech, which is what he carries in that famous briefcase or "red box". The first red box was used by William Gladstone back in 1860, and it was carried by almost every Chancellor right up till 1997. It was then that the increasingly tatty box, which by now was really showing its years, was eventually retired for good by Gordon Brown, who had a new box specially made for his very first Budget. (What many people don't know is that every Government minister actually carries important documents in a red box – we just know about the Chancellor's because he's the only one who waves it about for the cameras.)