Call me Lebedev. He is the bemused character in Chekhov's Ivanov who struggles to make sense of the world and the people around him. He doesn't understand his wife, he doesn't understand his daughter, he doesn't understand the depressed Ivanov, who - in Tom Stoppard's version - Lebedev accuses of having turned life into a gallery of modern art.

“I look on and I don't understand anything...” Not a great qualification in a columnist. When I saw the play in London last Friday, the minor references in the text to banks, deposits and credit, drew nervous, disproportionate and strangely unknowing laughter from the audience. Plenty of people out there could do with some certainty, and all I feel is a sense of confusion. I look back at my own columns of a week or two ago and feel they were written in a different decade.

There was a time when I understood things. As a whippersnapper I called the Labour leadership for Kinnock in '83, when Peter Mandelson was predicting Hattersley. I did the same for John Major in '90, when all around me were Hurdites. I got Blair, Hague and Cameron (with a blip over Iain Duncan Smith).

But now? Sarah Palin? It never occurred to me that John McCain would so contaminate his brand of pragmatic conservatism as to run with a tyro far-right ignoramus, however complementary her demographic. Peter Mandelson back in the Cabinet? I didn't see that one coming. I am not so useless that I can't predict that, other things being equal, Obama and Cameron will shake hands at the London Olympics of 2012, yet I do wonder whether other things will ever be equal again.

Take yesterday. I wake up in the morning to the doomy news that Germany has done an Ireland and sabotaged European strategic unity on the credit crisis. By 3pm, it transpires, Germany hasn't done any such thing. On the BBC website Robert Peston (the Rageh Omaar of the Crash of 2008) is telling me that “Alistair Darling and the Treasury can't get any sense out of the German Government about what it is precisely that they are doing. So there's no point in responding to something that's still a touch ephemeral.”

Then I find out that Iceland - a country with a population the size of Leicester - may now be nationalising its biggest three banks, because they (who knew?) “dwarf the rest of the economy”. I've been to Reykjavik. It looks like Bournemouth with mountains. It may be that there are British columnists or broadcasters somewhere who were pointing out, years back, that even Iceland was over-exposed to bad debt. If so, I missed it.

When forecasters and sages fail, the stage is set for prophets instead. One strong strand of crunch prophecy predicts the end of capitalism itself. You can find it on the political right, where the Texan Republican Congressman, Jeb Hensarling, described the Bush rescue package as “the slippery slope to socialism”. You can find it spread across the spectrum in Britain. When I was on Any Questions in Worthing a few weeks ago the audience in this most Tory of seaside seats applauded Tony Benn for advocating the nationalisation of the oil companies. In 1983 they'd probably have voted to hang him.

You can find it on the left. When I was a student in the very pessimistic mid '70s, there was one organisation that - like the man with the “End is Nigh” sandwich boards - perpetually proclaimed the final crisis. The 500 strong Socialist Labour League (the one Vanessa Redgrave belonged to) would pronounce the imminence of a world slump, to be followed by revolutionary conditions ripe for the leadership of... the Socialist Labour League. It took them 20 years of disappointment to drop the prediction.

You get a better class of slump person these days. Any halfway media-friendly academic is to be discovered ushering in, the “new world” of the chastened, weakened America and the ascendant (almost morally ascendant) China. And over in Guardianland there is some relish for the coming Götterdämmerung.

Madeleine Bunting, an interesting writer who combines religiosity with a vague leftism, writes of the collapse of the three-decade long economic orthodoxy of “neoliberal capitalism”. While we were engaged in the “sideshow” of the War on Terror, “the real doomsday scenario that poses a far greater threat to Western civilisation (whatever that is) was gathering pace right next to Ground Zero, in Wall Street.” “Whatever that is?” Democracy. Free press. Freedom of speech and assembly. Not burying women alive.

Another time, Madeleine, for there is my old comrade Bea Campbell, declaring that, within two decades, unrestrained capitalism “in doing its thing, unrestrained, it has brought the world to the brink”, though she doesn't say what of. Then, admitting that “progressives” are disorientated and unorganised, she adds: “And yet, and yet... progressives interested in a dynamic, inventive, co-operative, democratic and egalitarian esprit didn't create this conjuncture, but it is the moment we have been waiting for.”

The moment we have been waiting for to do what? I mean given that the world is supposedly “on the brink”? Bea might have used the word socialist, because at least that connoted a belief in an alternative economic system. But now there is no such belief, and what the “Left” seems to argue for is some kind of odd return to the capitalist settlement as at 1980, before Reagan and Thatcher got their hands on the policy levers.

So where does this fantasy - which could easily seduce a section of the Labour Party - take us? Thatcher partly won the legacy battle because, having opposed the privatisation of British Telecom, even the most purblind social democrat could see that she had been right and didn't want the old BT back. They could also see, with the Common Agricultural Policy, where protectionism got us. Don't just say “better regulation” or “taxes on the fat cats”, comrades. That's not a new dawn.

So these gentle mumblings will turn out to be like Monty Python's Boring Prophet from The Life of Brian who predicts merely that things will be put inside other things. We have yet to experience the real consequences of the credit crunch - the joblessness, the spending cuts, the creation of a pessimistic generation. When those hit us we can expect the more exciting prophets, the soft sellers of millenarian brands, the BNPs, the scapegoating anti-capitalists of the near fringes, to begin to affect the mainstream politics of the country.

The boring prophets are just the John the Baptists of the Second Coming. We Lebedevs are going to have to sort ourselves out.

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