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When Is a Gladstone Bag Not a Gladstone Bag?   When it's carried by the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, of course, and it's that battered old dispatch box, coloured red, which has been around since the middle 1800s but was recently laid to one side to make way for a new one. The box used until a few years ago actually belonged to Prime Minister Gladstone who first used it in the Budget for 1860. But unlike the standard Gladstone Bag, big and bulky, with solid wooden or metal frame and two massive internal pockets, the Chancellors' Budget Box is a rather boring design, flat and red, and actually quite small.
 

Maybe they didn't have quite so much material to put into the Budget Box, then and now, or perhaps they really might consider using a genuine Gladstone Bag rather than just the current small boring old suitcase. It's the size of the genuine Gladstone Bag that endears it to professionals with lots of equipment and papers to transport, such as doctors and lawyers, also politicians, as well as the fact the genuine design has two very large internal pockets to keep items separate and easier to sort through.

There's another big feature of the Gladstone Bag that makes it so popular with professionals on the move, being that it opens wide and allows the contents to be removed more easily than from most holdalls. Another big feature of the Gladstone Bag over the red dispatch box? The former opens at the top making it almost impossible for the contents to spill out or be blown away in transit, compared to the red suitcase type dispatch box which if dropped would have its contents blown far and wide.