Alistair Darling is 54. He is too young to remember 1948. (All right, I admit, so am I.) It is therefore strange that he should have taken the year of the Lynskey tribunal into Whitehall corruption and the docking of the Empire Windrush as his previous annus horribilis for the British economy.

Whatever was going through Mr Darling's mind, the interview was the least advised by a Chancellor of the Exchequer since Norman Lamont, once out of office, told a Times journalist that John Major, then Prime Minister, was “weak and hopeless”. Mr Darling, like Mr Lamont, is probably guilty of the worst sin of any politician, speaking his mind as he sees it rather than as filtered through the party line.

In any case, he is wrong. Yesterday the OECD said Britain would slip into a technical recession in the second half of the year, after a flat outturn in the second quarter.

Or rather, the OECD said Britain might. Like Schrödinger's cat, the economy is either dead or alive, and we will never know until we look. The OECD's forecasts, which take the UK housing market into account for the first time, have a 1.2 per cent margin of error, which means they suggest the economy may fall by 1.5 per cent in the third quarter, or it may grow by 0.9 per cent.

It cannot be said too often that the pending recession, if such it is, may be prolonged and savage, or it may be relatively benign, a case of a couple of quarters of adjustment. By contrast the most recent serious recession, in the late 1970s, saw GDP fall for five consecutive quarters, ending almost 5 per cent lower then when it set in.

The UK housing market, which occasioned some of the OECD's concern, is in nothing like the state of the US, with huge tracts of blue-collar homes depopulated. Here, the downturn has merely tempered the briefly held delusion that a family home in an ordinary London suburb is worth a million quid. Last Thursday we learnt that the US economy, despite those housing woes, far from growing a “mere” 1.9 per cent in the second quarter, actually grew by 3.3 per cent - a margin of error at which even OECD statisticians might balk.

Unemployment, three million at the height of Thatcherism, is half that today, although this does not factor in an unspecified few hundred thousand indolents on incapacity benefit.

The oil price, which initially let the inflation genie out of the bottle, is subsiding towards $100 a barrel, a level that is making nervous producers such as Iran press for production cuts. This suggests that, as inflation reverts to more normal levels, there is scope for the interest rate cuts from the Bank of England that will be denied us this week.

Perhaps Mr Darling's main crime was shouting “fire” in a crowded theatre. This is not the job of the Chancellor, no matter if there is the scent of smoke in the air.

Times Recommends

• Lies and cover-up at MG Rover exposed by report
• High oil prices push manufacturing costs up
• Primark founder steps down as chief executive