Twice a year, whenever the chancellor delivers the Budget or an Autumn Statement, political journalists who have just watched the speech in the House of Commons chamber traipse out of the press gallery and stand around a long wooden table piled up with copies of the briefing enclosed in brown envelopes, where they are given further information by political advisers from the Treasury.
These Treasury advisers are tasked with convincing the 40-odd reluctant journalists they have just heard the best announcement ever made by a chancellor, one which will set the country's economy on the right track, and that they should stop asking awkward questions about the details.
For the six years George Osborne served as chancellor this involved Treasury advisers repeatedly emphasising just how fantastic it was that the government was cutting the deficit, largely through reducing public spending.
Austerity measure after austerity measure was justified as a way of clearing the UK's deficit – the difference between the amount the UK spends and raises in taxes – and ultimately perhaps paying down the UK's debt.
But this year it was different. Philip Hammond is not about to end austerity measures, but his team – in large part due to the UK's slowing economic growth and the uncertainty around Brexit forcing an extra £122 billion of borrowing – were not even pretending that the Conservatives' symbolic objective of closing the deficit was at the forefront of their minds.
It was Osborne himself who, in his final post-referendum days as chancellor, abandoned the target of balancing the budget by the end of the current parliament in 2020 – having already abandoned the original target of 2015.
Hammond confirmed he'd move on from the rule in a speech at last month's Conservative party conference, but his aides have taken this further. They are now talking in vague terms about a balanced budget by the 2021/22 financial year if the Conservatives stay in power for a third parliamentary term, resulting in at least a dozen years of austerity.
"He has chosen to borrow to invest," said one Treasury official at this year's briefing. "His judgment is that it would be the wrong thing to do to introduce spending cuts or tax increases."
The chancellor's aides weren't willing to formally abandon the Conservative manifesto target – "he is totally committed to achieving a balanced budget in the future" – but they insisted a "flexible approach is needed now". In short, don't expect a renewed commitment to deficit balancing to be at the centre of Conservative policy in the near future.
Labour hit back, with shadow chancellor John McDonnell declaring the decision was proof that "the so-called long-term economic plan has failed". Just 18 months ago Labour went into the general election also pledging to abolish the deficit by 2020, in a bid to match the Conservatives' commitment. This time around debate has moved on so substantially that McDonnell's criticism was barely noticed.
What this means – in a decidedly strange turn of events – is that McDonnell's own commitment to be able to balance the books on current spending within a five-year period is increasingly looking as restrictive as the Conservative equivalent.
The right-wing TaxPayers' Alliance, which campaigns to reduce public spending, furiously complained that the "truth is that spending has barely been trimmed" and Hammond was setting the UK up for "two decades of living beyond our means".
But the times have moved on for many right-wing MP and activists in British politics. Austerity measures will remain but debt will rise and the sluggish economy will hit government revenues. For many deficit obsessives on the right of British politics the fixation with balancing the budget has been replaced by a fixation with ensuring Britain is led out of the EU.
Rather than worry about consistently failing to meet George Osborne's fiscal rule on deficit reduction, Philip Hammond had a simple solution: abolish it altogether. And on Wednesday afternoon he did. From next year it simply won't exist.