Osborne should phone a friend

We’ve all been there. You get a letter from the mobile phone company that says you’re massively out of pocket.

George Osborne knows the feeling.

He got £2.34 billion from auctioning off frequencies for 4G broadband. But he was banking on getting £3.5 billion when he wrote his autumn statement.

The missing billion means that the deficit will have risen over 2012-3.