Unlike his boss, the Chancellor knows that, now more than ever, the public expects honesty from its politicians about the measures that will be needed to wrench us out of our present economic predicament. It is always risky for politicians to be candid about the pain that lies ahead, which is why Gordon Brown, Mr Sunshine himself, chose to condemn the Tories in The Daily Telegraph yesterday as "pessimists", and why the Tories are already embroiled in an argument over their figures with the National Institute of Economic and Social Research. But the much riskier option, in the wake of the expenses scandal, at a time when the political class is held in wretchedly low esteem, would be to try to conceal the truth, or be, as the late Alan Clark would have put it, economical with the actualité. At this moment in political history, that would be, to put it mildly, a false economy.