As he did so, every school, hospital, local authority, public sector trade union leader and spending minister mentally declared this autumn to be one long flag day for their own good cause.Fine. As the Prime Minister said to the TUC on Tuesday, everybody should hold out their hands to the Chancellor; it's only natural. A soft answer turneth away wrath; but it still leaves the really big question intact. If we are heading for a period of sustained growth and high revenues, how should the benefits of this growth best be distributed?Should we go on a public spending spree? Pig out on lower personal taxation? Pay off what remains of the national debt? Or take the opportunity to invest in big, one-off improvements to the national infrastructure?As it happens, the Chancellor's speech coincides with one of those cyclical debates that we have in Britain about poverty.

Film crews and investigative journalists are jamming into the sink estates and failing schools of the nation, and sending us back terrible reports about how the excluded are getting on. Far better to give it to the Barnardos people, who - in their green tabards - have been laying mass siege to this area during the last three weeks.Bill and Ben would go mad over Gordon Brown. Yesterday the Chancellor strolled happily down the sunlit high street of the British economy, openly celebrating the achievement of the golden scenario: low inflation plus steady growth. The least one of them could do, if they really want my cash, is to contract some disfiguring illness. And, without going all Jack Straw about it, I can't see what they're doing there. Unemployment in the area is pretty low, and there are cards in lots of the shop windows looking for labour. It could be that each of them is indeed suffering from some hidden affliction which forces them to beg, but my strong feeling is that they ought to be working.

So if I've got any money to spare, then Bill and Ben are not getting it. And all morning long they sit in their allotted doorways and matter-of-factly request change or - if they spot a smoker - cigarettes. It's almost as though they were stallholders, selling the exercising of charitable impulses to passers-by I rather resent them. They have all their limbs and they don't shout or mutter, or execute spectacular slumps on to the roadway. Bill is 30-ish and plump, with a blond pigtail, and Ben is in his early twenties, with his hair in short dreadlocks and his face set in a pleasant smile. FOR SOME reason two beggars, Bill and Ben, have taken up residence on my high street. We've always had Big Issue sellers, but these two aren't doing anything Nor are they alcoholics, as far as I can tell.

Ah, that is exactly the kind of epitaph that Alan Clark's ennobled father would have shuddered at, writes Jasper Conway, our Snobbery Consultant. Lord Clark was a fastidious man who was horrified by the thought that anyone actually watched his TV programmes. He would certainly have been horrified if he had known that his son, Alan Clark, was feeding the Russians with prior knowledge of every objet d'art that was about to be featured in the Civilisation series, thus allowing the Soviets to invest in the very art that was about to shoot up in value.Lord Clark was such a private person that he in fact wanted to call his book on the nude in art "Some Statues With Not Very Many Clothes On". But his publishers prevailed, and Lord Clark was the author of a book called The Nude...Lord Clark was the author of a book on The Nude.