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Politics is a dirty business, and seldom more dirty than the scene played out under the Mansion House lights at last night's Lord Mayor's banquet.
The story that should have emerged from the speech by Chancellor Alistair Darling at the event was his recognition that activity in the UK economy is sinking and therefore growth will be significantly less than the Treasury was predicting in the Budget in March.
Given that tax revenues are very closely linked to activity levels in the economy, that creates a strong likelihood that tax receipts will fall well short of target and the Government will have to borrow much more than anticipated to make up the shortfall. It follows further that the return of inflation will make things worse because so much Government spending - pension increases for example - are tied to the RPI which is currently running at 4.3% and is likely to push 5% by year end.
Benefits spending will also have to rise further and revenues will fall away more as unemployment increases. None of this was planned for in the Budget, so the Government's finances, which were already in a poor state, are going to look even worse.
Darling is wise enough to know that he will shortly face the worst of all dilemmas for a Chancellor, one faced by Norman Lamont back in 1992 - and look what happened to him, sacked so brutally that his career never recovered.
The problem then, and the problem looming now, is that fiscal orthodoxy requires that taxes be increased, and government spending be cut to try to narrow the budget deficit and bring public finances back under control.
The financial markets demand this in return for continuing to lend the Government the money it needs. But both those actions force the economy to contract and will make the slowdown worse.
As if that were not challenge enough, Darling will have to take these brutal decisions when he knows that within a few further months the country will have a general election and the voters will have their opportunity to pass judgement on his actions.
No doubt adjustments are being made to the economic models that underline the figures in the Pre-Budget Report, which comes out in the autumn. We should be bracing ourselves for more bad news.
However almost none of this appeared in the papers because today's headlines were all about the abrupt departure of Sir John Gieve from his position as Deputy Governor of the Bank of England in a move that was widely seen as positioning him as the fall guy for the Northern Rock debacle - rather unjustly I think, given that he did not manage it, did not regulate it , and simply tried to rescue it. But there was real brutality below the surface.
Gieve knew he was going. It was part of the horse trading which led to the deal between the Treasury and the Bank of England over the future shape of banking regulation and the appointment of Charles Bean as replacement for the other Deputy Governor, Rachael Lomax.
But crucially it had also been agreed that no announcement would be made until today, after the Mansion House banquet, when Gieve would be safely in Newcastle delivering a speech on the economy.
But then the PR spinners got to work. Whitehall realised if it leaked the news of Gieve's departure it would deflect press and therefore public attention from the unfolding economic debacle. Thus it was that Sir John, sitting at the top table of the Lord Mayor's banquet even as the Chancellor was holding forth a few feet away, was told by text message that the BBC's evening news was leading on his departure.
In scenes bordering on farce - and humiliation - he had to vet the wording of an emergency statement from the Bank's press office on his Blackberry under the table, while the speeches droned on around him.
Whether or not one thinks it is time for Gieve to go, no one deserves to be treated like that. It is Whitehall, spin and media manipulation at its worst.
