The glum faces on the government benches said it all. A pre-Budget report predicting misery for large swathes of the population was not in the script that Alistair Darling thought he had inherited when he took over at the Treasury in the summer of 2007. But that was the speech he was forced to deliver on Monday.

Although the chancellor delivered economic downgrades bigger than any since the 1980s, and many of the underlying assumptions were extremely gloomy, many economists were questioning whether the government had been pessimistic enough.