Comedians are running the economy but no-one's laughing

Aug 31 2008 By John Cranage, Business Staff

The headline on the front of Saturday’s Financial Times said “Palin to shake up election fight in US”. My first thought was “mmm...from Monty Python to the Republic presidential ticket, not bad.”

A nano-second passed while that particular image triggered some wonderful images before my brain caught up with reality (to the extent it ever does) and I realised the Palin in question wasn’t Michael but Sarah, the governor of Alaska slated to run with John McCain.

Would America welcome a real comedian in the White House? Probably not. It takes its politics pretty seriously - some obvious lapses aside.

Here it’s different. Jokers in Downing Street? We’ve had dozens of them.

In fact, our own Alistair Darling looks as though he could step straight into a post-modernist update of Python’s Dead Parrot sketch, taking over John Cleese’s angry customer role opposite Gordon Brown’s shopkeeper.

“I wish to complain about this economy what I purchased not half an hour ago from this very boutique.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it, my lad. It’s dead, that’s what’s wrong with it!”
“No, no, its...resting.”
“Look matey, I know a dead economy when I see one, and I’m looking at one right now.”

And so on.

It’s not funny, of course, but there’s something about poor, luckless Alistair Darling that makes those with a black sense humour laugh out loud. Not only is he left trying to head off what could be the worst economic slump since the Great Depression, he’s rattled his boss and predecessor by actually saying so in public.

Conditions, he said, are “arguably the worst they’ve been in 60 years”. And things are going to get worse. “I think it is going to be more profound and long-lasting than people thought.”

And he went on to use bad language. “People are pissed off with us,” he said.

I’d put it stronger than that. I think people are damned pissed off with the Government, actually Alistair.

It’s the nature of government these days that not even chancellors can get away with telling the truth (not that Gordon Brown has ever tried to so far as I can work out) and so Mr Darling had to don sackcloth and ashes and recant.

In “clarification” he said he was talking about global conditions not those in Britain, where the economic fundamentals remain “strong”.

That’s OK, then. Of course, UK plc is completely immune to the problems besetting its trading partners throughout the world.

That’s not to say the doom and gloom isn’t being overcooked. I’ve argued here recently that comparisons with now and the 1970s do not hold much water - not yet, at least.

The theory grew over the weekend that, having pissed off Gordon Brown, Mr Darling, having suffered a distinctly Geoffrey Howe moment, will soon be calling the removal men into 11 Downing Street.

Would anybody outside the rapidly band of New Labour loyalists care if Mr Darling goes? Probably not.

Except that he would most likely be replaced by Ed (“post-neoclassical endogenous growth theory”) Balls and that really wouldn’t be funny.