Alistair Darling looked like someone facing a wide and deep chasm with the materials for a short and rickety bridge. In his second Budget, the chancellor’s most important task was to explain how to put the UK’s public finances on a sustainable basis. Labour MPs were also hoping he would enhance his party’s popularity on the way to the election. He did better on the second than the first. The plan to raise the top rate of income tax to 50 per cent from next April was astute political tactics, although poor revenue raising. But the grim state of Britain’s books made bleak reading and the fragile optimism behind Mr Darling’s plan for getting from here to fiscal rectitude could not be disguised.

More eye-catching than any of the initiatives littering Mr Darling’s speech was the scale of government borrowing now envisaged for the coming years. The Treasury expects public sector net borrowing, almost doubling from the previous year, to hit £175bn or 12.4 per cent of gross domestic product in 2009-10 – the most the UK government has ever borrowed in peacetime. This gap will take time to fill. The government expects to borrow almost as much the following year. These torrents of red ink create a heavy public debt burden. Public sector net debt is expected to reach 79 per cent of GDP before it stabilises in 2014-15.