Hangover time

Anyone who stockpiled their vodka collection ahead of yesterday’s savage increases in alcohol duties will probably be feeling a little rough this morning; and so too will Alastair Darling, I suspect, even if he carried on drinking tap water through the evening, as he did at the despatch box, and confined himself to a bowl of thin cockaleekie for his supper. For no performer in any theatre, political or otherwise, has taken such a savage pasting from the critics since Michael Barrymore’s last West end comeback. Dismal, blinkered and dangerously misguided would be a fair summary of what the pundits thought.

The Chancellor’s claim that the UK economy is more ‘resilient’ than any other major economy to the threat of a downturn or recession was met with a shower of scorn: how can that possibly be so when our public finances are in worse shape than those of almost all our competitior countries and when our economy is so much more dependent than most of theirs on the one sector, financial services, which is clearly in the deepest trouble worldwide? As to the practical content of this dog of a performance: it was summed up by most observers as yet another sting on the middle classes, whose family motoring and wine-drinking costs will rise sharply, while their businesses receive no useful support or relief at all at a moment when the economy is in a dip that could all too suddenly turn into a nosedive.