Weekly news - Osborne's Budget / Missing Flight MH370

So Gideon unveiled his (hopefully) final Budget as Chancellor of the Exchequer, and as ever the media spasmed into analytical overdrive over this perennial fixture in the calender of largely artificial parliamentary charades.

What we got from this annual farrago, was a custom-built budget for the elderly and the soon-to-be-elderly baby boomer generation, with pension reforms and savings being overhauled; the thinking being that if enough property-rich pensioners can be prevented from sailing off into the arms of UKIP then a Tory victory in 2015 will be notably secure.

The prime laughing point of the whole event was the publicity campaign and Grant Shapp's comments that the budget's relaxation of tax duty on beer and bingo allowed working class people more freedom to indulge in the recreations they enjoy most; a statement so hilariously misjudged that it would lead one to assume the Tories have now decided to bring their own spoofing in-house.

All this though was a helpful distraction from the glaring omissions in Osborne's Budget: silence on rising societal inequality, the cost of living crisis facing millions after 4 years of austerity - a point Labour are sure to flog to death even more ferociously now their lead in the polls is slimming fast - and absolutely no mention of the fact that in 21st century Britain almost 350,000 people became dependent on food banks over the last 12 months.

No, this was a Budget intended, in a way spuriously analogous to Putin's land-grabbing of Crimea, to annex that core 35% of the electorate back under Conservative sovereignty, shrugging off the deadwood of the Liberal Democrats and away from the dubious temptations of UKIP or Labour.

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On rumbles the Flight MH370 mystery, at the time of writing now appearing to have been resolved as a fatal crash into the Southern Indian Ocean. Yet despite this finality for the victims' families, there is still no clearing of likely theory amidst the jungle of speculation and theorising.

On Newsnight a week or so ago, Alain de Botton expostulated the idea that the overriding ambiguity of the event was antithetical to the nature of news consumption in which both providers and consumers demand 'fast food' news to be devoured quickly and easily with all the relevant facts and figures neatly arranged and ordered. I agree with this hypothesis as a prevailing trend but only up to a point.

I think conversely, when the news focuses on events that are detached from the public (i.e. have no direct impact or influence on them), they have a dramatic potency to which we are able to vicariously harness our intrigue.

This can be seen presently manifesting itself in a number of different stories - from the ongoing Oscar Pistorius trial, a daily televised soap opera in which we are obliged to formulate our own interpretations on his guilt or innocence like a mass international jury.

The same could also be said of the lurid contemplation of the provocation behind L'Wren Scott's suicide, a glamorous successful woman who, relatively speaking, would appear to have little cause for self-destruction (except that despair and anguish are seldom held at the border controls of wealth and achievement).