If this team were running a company, they'd be out

Any ideas about paying it off? Don't be silly. On his own projections, the best we can hope is to get back to acceptable levels of borrowing halfway through the next decade - but who can say what will have happened by then? We may be at war with the Isle of Man.

Along the way, we shall be reminded that when a Chancellor borrows, that is not an alternative to raising money from taxes. It merely postpones them - and the longer the postponement lasts, the more they need to bring in. Some of these post-dated cheques on the taxpayer were written into his statement. The last Chancellor to try this was Norman Lamont, a busy borrower who announced that taxes would go up in his next budget. When that time came, he wasn't there, and not all his cheques got through.

Darling's debacle could be seen a long way off. Gordon Brown, was the biggest spender in our history, and he always got the sum wrong. In budget after budget, he would announce his borrowing for the year ahead, and murmur that last year's figure was an under-estimate. Eight months ago, Darling came out with a figure that will be less than half what he needs.

Imagine that they were running, not a country, but a company. In the good times they had borrowed more than they planned, and now that the bad times were here, they wanted to borrow their way out of trouble. What would they be told? "We shall need to see a less profligate business plan, and a new finance director. And we notice that your previous finance director stepped up to become chief executive - so we shall want him out, too."

One other way out of trouble, open to countries but not to companies, is to wear away the debt's real value. Inflation is the name for that. This worked under the last of the Old Labour governments, when inflation reached 26.9 per cent. Today's fashionable worry is deflation, but fashions change, under pressure, and credit erodes. The sort of money that Darling now reckons to borrow cannot be had for the asking.

So much for the proceeds of growth, which the Tories looked forward to sharing. What growth? What proceeds? They would have done better to stick to first principles, and to say that until the public finances were put in order, nothing else would go right. On Budget day, year after year, I said as much, and yearned for a Chancellor who would act on it. King Solomon knew better: hope deferred, he said, maketh the heart sick.