// BBC UK NEWS — CRONACA
Chris Mason: The Budget is imminent as tricky things pile up for Burnham
There are several issues on the horizon for the prime minister
This feels like the week where the rubber hits the road for the prime minister's new government.
It is now 100 days since Andy Burnham arrived in Downing Street from Buckingham Palace and began to assemble his cabinet.
Three months later, Labour MPs are more chipper, the party's poll ratings have notched up and the tone and style of government feels very different from when Sir Keir Starmer was in charge.
Coming next, though, there are a whole series of crunchy decisions and trade offs – economic and political – some of which are inevitable and some of which Burnham has decided to lean into.
You would be forgiven for only just clocking there is a Budget this week.
There are three reasons for this year's feeling like a comparatively low key affair: it is happening a month earlier than a year ago, squeezing the space available for briefings, leaks and speculation. It is considerably smaller in big picture terms – in other words the scale of tax rises – so limiting the noisy talk in advance about who might get clobbered. And the new chancellor John Healey and his team have sought to make a virtue out of not saying very much beforehand.
But woe betide suggesting to anyone involved in assembling this Budget that it is a steady-as-she-goes, nothing-to-see-here thing.
Every Budget is a big deal, goes the argument run past me by some. They don't all have to be visible from space in the way some recent ones have been – think Kwasi Kwarteng in one direction followed by Jeremy Hunt in the other four years ago, or Rachel Reeves in the last two years.
Cost of living support for some, help for entrepreneurs, more financial clout for mayors in England and an economy now recuperating will be themes for Healey on Wednesday.