As Oscar Wilde quipped of Little Nell’s death, you would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh. On 24 November, Alistair Darling told the Commons: ‘I, too, am forecasting that output will continue to fall in the UK, for the first two quarters of [2009]. But then, because of decisions taken in this Pre-Budget Report, I expect it to start to recover.’
This prophecy seemed preposterous enough at the time, as we pointed out immediately on our Coffee House blog. Four and half months later, it is downright surreal that the custodian of the nation’s finances felt able to make such an obviously bonkers prediction to the Commons and the electorate. On Sunday, the Chancellor had to admit that he had been talking nonsense. ‘It’s worse than we thought,’ he conceded in a morose interview with the Sunday Times.
Mr Darling’s ‘November Prophecy’, as it will surely come to be known, deserves a place in the historic roll-call of rubbish predictions. High on that list are Charles Darwin’s ‘I see no good reasons why the views given in [The Origin of Species] should shock the religious sensibilities of anyone’; Daryl F. Zanuck’s ‘Television won’t be able to hold onto any market it captures after the first six months’; and the Decca Recording Co’s view in 1962 of the Beatles: ‘We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.’
Yet, in view of the electorate’s likely response to this government’s failures, Mr Darling’s foolish claim reminds us of another famous prediction, instantly disproved. As he looked out over the parapet at enemy lines during the Battle of Spotsylvania in 1864, Gen. John Sedgwick declared: ‘They couldn’t hit an elephant at this dist—’
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