I feel sorry for anyone who tried to make head or tail of the government's fiscal plans from reading or listening to the statement made to the House of Commons by Alistair Darling, the new chancellor, in his pre-Budget report. It was the usual confusing mixture of propagandist figures, some year-on-year, others covering three years at a time, some in nominal terms and some in real terms, and the poor listener would have to work out for himself what they were changes in.

The Treasury has been so primed during Gordon Brown's tenure as chancellor that any decent official could have written the latest parliamentary statement standing on his head. Someone who paid £45 for the complete report would be only a little wiser. The one definite trend to emerge is that public spending is expected to rise by an average of 2.1 per cent a year during the next three years compared with some 4 per cent estimated for 1999-2008. Even that comparison had to be extracted from the small print by the Institute for Fiscal Studies.