The Sketch: The Treasury takes credit for economic growth, and so do I

There's a joke - technical term - about a mouse and an elephant. As in the way of jokes, the mouse effects sexual intercourse with the elephant and a falling boulder hits the elephant on the head, making her groan. The mouse inquires (and this is the punchline): "I'm not hurting you, am I, darling?"

Treasury questions always brings this joke to mind. John Healey, for instance, declares the current era is "the longest period of sustained low inflation since the 1960s". Mr Healey is more rat-like in appearance than mouse-like but he finds himself in the same position as the rodent in the joke. He implies that the Government is responsible for this phenomenon. But prices are going down all over the world; there are enormous deflationary forces at work, elephantine in their size and power.

Never mind all that, it will soon be incumbent on me, as politicians have started to say, to reconcile my years of jeering, cynicism and scorn-pouring with the fact that this really has been the longest period of non-inflationary growth that the British economy has enjoyed in living memory. And notwithstanding the Sketch's likening of the Chancellor's condition to a yodelling mental patient, his estimates of growth have been more accurate than mine. Frankly, I'm surprised. I thought my chickens had more reliable entrails than his.

The Treasury takes credit for this economic growth. But then so do I. My mortgage is the size of Central Africa. As a result of the patriotic spending of myself and millions like me, personal debt is now as large as GDP (as David Amess tried to tell us). How long can it go on for? No one knows. At least the Chancellor didn't try to answer that question (but then he never does). He did say that the cost of servicing debt was half what it was. Why? Because of low inflation (see above).

Gordon Brown claimed that the Tories will abolish the New Deal, and he is against this because he says the New Deal has all but eliminated unemployment. Various studies, some official, suggest that most New Deal graduates would have found jobs anyway, that the cost of the programme is poor value for money, and that there are now some millions who are neither employed nor unemployed but (in a new phrase) "economically inactive". Did someone say that 20 per cent of the workforce was now on a sickness benefit?

That makes something of a roaring mouse of the Chancellor as well.

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