Darling's grim Christmas Carol

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Well it was always going to be grim. And, bingo and boilers apart, it most certainly was grim. On a Dickensian scale.

And who is better equipped to deliver such dire news than chancellor Alistair Darling, tailor-made for a part in a gritty TV adaptation of Bleak House or not-so Great Expectations.

The Chancellor delivered his prognosis in the way of the doctor who tells you the bad news is you have six months to live, and the worse news is he should have told you six months ago.

So Mr Darling rose to the despatch box, grey suit and coordinated greyish tie, to remind us that he was the first to predict this was going to be the worst recession since the flood, but actually it's worse than that.

The message seemed to be: "That's alright then. Here is a serious man, in a serious suit, telling us he knows how serious things are and has been planning for it for ages."

He also told us, in his quiet, soft tones, that he had serious remedies.

Thankfully, they won't really start to hurt until, let's see - ah yes, after the next general election."

Gordon Brown sat one side of him, alternately smiling and frowning, Harriet Harman the other, occasionally looking up to the heavens, other times biting her finger nails.

Read what you like into all that.

None of it seemed to be linked in any way to what the chancellor was actually saying. Perhaps they were pondering how to take advantage of the boiler scrappage scheme just announced by the chancellor.

They did both seem to snap out of it when the word "bingo" was mentioned.

Apparently, it's over-taxed and the chancellor is having none of it, so he's reducing the duty on it. No idea why really.

And so it ground on, softly, relentlessly and seriously.

Until George Osborne leapt to his feet and had TV viewers reaching for the volume control.

He started at 11 and seemed to get louder, banging the despatch box, pointing his finger and generally expressing his disbelief that this disastrous government had not been thrown out of office by a popular uprising. Give it time.

The contrast with the chancellor could not have been starker.

This was high-octane, energetic, angry stuff. Perhaps he was so furious because Darling had wrong-footed him with his boiler scrappage scheme, or his bingo giveaway.

There was precious little detail of his own policies, and you can hardly blame him for that. Best to get through that general election first.

His speech burnt itself out quite quickly before the chamber returned to the relative calm produced by Vice Cable, not quite the guru he once was after his "mansion tax" foul-up.

Still, the House listens to him in a way his own party leader can only dream of.

It was, he said: "a good budget for bingo and boilers".

There they are again, perhaps Darling's on to something after all.

But he quietly depressed things a touch further by wondering why on earth the chancellor had assumed growth from next year.

"It's like the economist given a tin of food to eat and says, let's assume the existence of a tin opener."

You see, things can get even worse.