For many of us, obviously the key moment in Alistair Darling’s Pre-Budget Report statement was the bit where he confirmed that “consistent with the code for fiscal stability, the Government is setting a temporary operating rule”. Woo! What a relief that was, you know, to hear that the Government had finally tamed that tiger.

I’ll admit that I’m quoting from memory, so it’s possible that what he actually said was “consistent with the code for a temporary operating rule, the Government is setting financial stability”. Yes, that must have been it.

No, hang on! Sifting my memory more carefully, I think what Mr Darling might actually have said is that “for fiscal stability, setting a temporary rule is consistent with the government operating code”. Sounds altogether more reassuring, doesn’t it?

The point is that it was at this moment in his speech that something important became clear. Because just as we were beginning to worry that we were facing an economic calamity we could not escape, we realised that, in actual fact, it was much worse: we were facing an economic calamity we could not even understand.

Darling's £1 trillion debt gamble

Alistair Darling stored up big tax rises for the better-paid and huge public spending curbs in his fight against recession. Watch video

• Need to know: Pre-Budget Report

• Shot in the arm for economy may prove a shot in the dark

• Parties reveal their battle lines for the next election

Life on Recession Road

The people of Marlow Road in Maidenhead, London give their verdicts on the economy

Related Links

• Shot in the arm may prove a shot in the dark

• Parties reveal battle lines for next election

• Censor’s pencil cuts out political gibes

Maybe last Christmas the Treasury was given one of those sets of fridge-magnet words you use to compose poems, and the Treasury staff now just randomly shuffle them until they hit on a combination that sounds like a plausible economic strategy.

The last big success these Treasury people had with this system was when they minted the phrase “postneoclassical endogenous growth theory”, which they got Gordon Brown to utter when he was Chancellor, thereby quashing once and for all the ugly rumour that Mr Brown has no sense of humour. When it can generate great jokes like these, who still dares to call economics the dismal science?

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