As I am sure you would expect, I work very hard in order to bring you the most sophisticated political analysis. You can't imagine the effort.

On a day like today, however, it's all worthwhile. I am able to sort through the complicated story and somehow make sense of it. Who's up? Who's down? You've come to the right place.

The Government announced on Monday that it is going to have to borrow £118 billion, that the country is almost bankrupt and that we won't be back in the black until 2015-16 at the very earliest. Even if everything goes well, there will now be a sharp recession lasting a year. Unemployment will rise. There will be several painfully tight public spending rounds, reversing the course of previous policy. And this will not prevent serious tax rises for years to come, much of the bill having to be picked up by swing voters.

Relying on my years of experience and book learning, taking one thing with another, and putting my thinking cap on, I'd say that means Monday was not a good day for the Government, politically speaking.

Can I collect my salary now?

Polls go up and down, the reputation of politicians falls and rises, but a modicum of common sense still comes in handy when looking at the whole sorry mess. Yes, the prospect of a downturn can make people risk-averse and temporarily make incumbents seem attractive. But no, I'd say that the virtual collapse of the banking system, the seizing-up of the economy and a plunge into a nightmare of debt and tax rises is really not a winning ticket for an incumbent government.

And this is the reason why all of yesterday's stories about new battle lines for the parties and sharp dilemmas for the Tory election machine were entirely misplaced. Provided David Cameron is not absurdly incautious, Alistair Darling's statement should not provide the Tory campaign effort with any difficulty at all.

I'll demonstrate.

The first thing that Mr Cameron and George Osborne must insist upon is that they absolutely will not set a path for public spending in advance of an election. Since this involves not doing something, it shouldn't be too hard.

The Tory team should argue that they believe that they can do better than Labour at efficiency savings and at reform, and that they will therefore spend less over the medium term, but that all previous exercises that pretend to provide exact numbers have been entirely bogus.

At the last election the Conservative Party said that it could put spending on a lower path and cut both taxes and borrowing. It argued that it could do this without damaging services, simply by increasing the amount of money saved through efficiency measures. Gordon Brown told the Commons in 2004 that an independent review had shown that not a penny more could be found in savings without damaging services. This was, in fact, Labour's central election claim.

And then, on Monday, guess what? The Chancellor announced that, lo and behold, another independent review had found that there were greater savings that could be made after all. Well, fancy that. The Tories should be able to prevail, making the argument that nothing Labour now says about the quantity of efficiency savings can be believed.

Next they should announce that they will do what they can to reverse the national insurance increases. There isn't a huge amount of money involved, so this should not be prohibitively difficult either. The Tories should say that they will have to look at the books, that they can't promise to be able to do it instantly, but that they believe that they will be able to find the money.

Is the tax rise on top earners a terrible snare? Of course not. It is easy to step around. The Tories can simply say that finding the money to reverse the tax on higher earners would be difficult and is not a priority.

They must then be stern about other tax cuts, which is only slightly harder. Mr Osborne has already said he wouldn't make big tax offers in advance, so all he has to do is stick to his guns. The Tories should argue that Labour has destroyed the public finances and that the first job for the Conservatives must be to restore sanity. They should emphasise that they are a low-tax party, and will do all they can, strain every sinew, to avoid rising taxes. But they should also say that things are so bad that they cannot make guarantees even about that. They should be open, volunteering this answer, not having it pulled out of them.

Thirdly, they should do what Margaret Thatcher did to Jim Callaghan - attack Labour on public services. At the same time as calling for less spending, Mrs Thatcher's Conservatives attacked Denis Healey's cuts. They said that if the economy was sounder, such cuts wouldn't have been needed. Mr Cameron can argue now that if Labour hadn't made such a mess, spending wouldn't need to be so tight. And if Labour had reformed services, the impact of the cuts need not be so great. Money could go to the front line if services were more efficient.

Again, pretty simple stuff.

So where's the dilemma? Where's the impossible problem? There are difficulties posed for them by this PBR with its spending restraint and its borrowing - terrible, almost insoluble difficulties - but they are all ones that will trouble Mr Cameron if he does become Prime Minister, not ones that would prevent him getting to No 10.

If the Conservatives want to win they have to show they are a serious, moderate, pragmatic party. The leadership has to show that it firmly controls the activists, and the activists have to stop panicking every time their lead is trimmed. All these things are challenges, all these things present dilemmas. But Mr Darling's report? Certainly not.

daniel.finkelstein@thetimes.co.uk

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