Then (says this fictional, competent Labour leader), faced with potential humiliation, Mr Osborne grabbed new projections from the Office for Budget Responsibility – the group of “independent” boffins on whom, in the last Parliament, he had decided to confer bogus authority – and announced that he had £27 billion more than he’d thought a few months earlier. Rather like someone who boasts of a bumper harvest solely on the basis of the long-range weather forecast, he “spent” the whole of the hypothetical sum he had just discovered. Then he had the cheek to tell the world that he was still pursuing his stern course of rectitude. Why on earth, my imagined Mr or Ms Not Corbyn could scornfully have asked, should anyone believe Mr Osborne’s claim that he is making Britain the “most prosperous economy in the world”?