Can the Chancellor’s ‘levelling up’ promises be fulfilled in next week’s budget?

“Events, Dear boy, events”. Harold McMillan’s famous response on what he feared most.

The event that has put a spanner in everyone’s works, including the Chancellor’s is of course the virus.

Next week’s budget from the new Chancellor Rishi Sunak was supposed to throw money at the government’s election promise of “levelling” up the forgotten towns.

But can that promise survive? Our political editor Gary Gibbon has been mapping out the options with the help of two experts on the economic geography of Britain.