Politics, politics, politics. What on earth is going on, or better question what on whatever planet they are on is going on?
Our Darling chancellor gives a remarkably frank interview in which he claims the economic situation is the worst it has been for 60 years.
Neither Ian nor myself are old enough to recall the situation then, but in my studying of history it strikes me that considering the devastation of WW2, the late 1940s and early 50s were a time of, at worst, consolidation and at best the beginnings of the growth that fuelled the baby boomer years.
Surely the worst economic crisis was in the 70s with exceptionally high interest rates and unemployment, and yes I know we have an ageing population but to compare today with a period that one would have to be 80+ to recall seems a trifle odd.
And there again what is Darling doing, deliberately undermining his revered leader, as Gordon attempts to relaunch his leadership by being positive, here is his chancellor doing a good impersonation of Marvin the paranoid android. "Oh no, things aren't bad, they are really really bad. They are so bad you have to go back almost beyond living memory to find a time that was so bad. They are even worse than in the 1970s with strikes, power cuts, raging inflation, unemployment and interest rates. Talk to your parents, cast your middle aged minds back to before the boom years of the eighties. How horrible it was then, but today it's even worse!"
Or perhaps dear Darling is trying to emulate the famous Yorkshireman sketch, you know the one. "When I was a lad we were so poor we couldn't even afford ricketts. We had to go out to work before we got up so we could pay the rent on our cardboard box."
"You were lucky, when I was a lad we were so poor we couldn't afford proper diseases in the home, we had to catch superbugs like c. difficile in hospital. We had to get up and go out to work before we had gone to bed so we could pay off the interest on the loan we took out to pay off the interest on the loan we took out. A cardboard box was a luxury, we had to live in a Bovis built paper bag."
Unless of course it is a cunning plan to lull us into a false sense of insecurity from which... da da dah, super Gordon will miraculously appear and swoop down to pull us all to safety.