Every now and again, at the celebrity end of this profession, the “best” pieces of star columnists are collected together in book form. And someone, presumably, buys them. Perhaps our worst scribblings - the most obtuse, the most irrelevant, the most quickly destroyed by events - should be anthologised. Pieces such as my column of September 23 - only two months ago - in which I suggested that Gordon Brown should not stay as Prime Minister. “New leader required,” read the headline, “Essential for next election”.

It was out of date, otiose almost, even as I wrote it. Worse, it was almost certain to be irrelevant, even if I couldn't know exactly why.

Six days later Congress's rejection of the Bush Administration's bank bailout marked the moment when it became horribly obvious - inescapable - that we were voyaging into terra incognita. Discussing the short-term survival of the Prime Minister and the mechanics for dislodging him was now a frivolity, a country-house pastime for boring hot afternoons in a summer long gone.

The Conservative conference the next week became an exercise in shadow-boxing, in moving around to no purpose to create the impression of purposefulness. All that really mattered was going on in emergency board meetings, Treasury discussions, congressional negotiations, fluctuations in the interbank lending rate and - can it be true? - Icelandic governmental conclaves.

The price of oil rose to record levels only to halve again in eight weeks. Food prices rose, supposedly because of biofuels, only to fall rapidly. Inflation burst its target, but may now fall to one half of 1 per cent.

That financial behemoth, Citigroup, saw its share value drop from $30 to under $4 in a year, and then climb 50 per cent yesterday on news of the latest rescue plan. This is no ordinary economic time, and what we are facing is no ordinary set of circumstances. In America President-elect Obama's economic advisers talk of a world “on the edge of deflation” - that is, potentially pre-depression - and prepare for a post-inauguration package described as setting aside their own budget- balancing orthodoxies and borrowing more “without concern” (as The New York Times had it yesterday) “for deficits”. The new President plans to save or create 2.5 million jobs.

Employment is the key question: the need to keep people at work and earning, rather than to allow unemployment, and all its attendant moral, social and fiscal hazards, to soar. The habit of worklessness is one of the most debilitating vices that any people can acquire. Some of us have forgotten this.

In this context the political debate surrounding the Chancellor's statement yesterday strikes me as being like that September column of mine - simultaneously pointless and irritating. The question should surely be whether Alistair Darling did enough stimulating, and whether his forecasts for avoiding a depression weren't too optimistic.

I can see that it must be profoundly dispiriting for an opposition to discover an 11-year-old government becoming more popular as the scale of the economic problems over which it has presided becomes ever clearer. Much of the opposition critique is, in broad terms, justified, although the idea of “the bill for Labour's irresponsibility” would be more convincing if one felt that a Conservative government would have been tighter regulators, sterner critics of the bonus culture and more puritanical exhorters to stick ye to the narrow paths of spending only what ye earn. I don't believe any of that.

As it happens I think that, had the Tories held their nerve, the prize would have been theirs in 2010. But then along came the most dangerous phrase in political life - “clear blue water”, the desire to emphasise differences between yourself and your opponent. So, according to the Shadow Chancellor, we shouldn't borrow more to spend more because we can save money because “public sector waste runs rampant”.

Does it? Shall we put a tight cap on local authority financing and discover whether our mostly Tory local government agrees with that? Does George Osborne really imagine that you can cut swaths through government spending without job losses and creating a further deflationary effect? This unreality is exceeded on the Left, where the 45 per cent rate of income tax on “the rich” in 2011 has been greeted with sighs of anticipatory pleasure as the first rough caresses on the way to orgasmic pip-squeaking. All this and bank nationalisation mean (they quiver) that socialism is back. Now we're going to run the economy, have Swedish levels of state spending and soak the fat cats. “Tony Blair”, agree the Tories and the Compassites, “would be turning in his grave.”

Tosh - which is what columnists are allowed to say in lieu of stronger expletives. This Government, for all its occasional depressing tricksiness (I wish, much though I like her, that someone would pinch Yvette Cooper, the Chief Secretary, hard every time she utters the self-exculpatory word “global”), is pretty undeviating from its new Labour pragmatism.

Borrowing will rise and then it will fall. The banks will be part publicly owned, but there is no appetite for civil servants to become bankers. When Gordon Brown talks about the challenges of the post-recession world, it isn't Cuba he's looking to.

But he can't see the future either. If he could he wouldn't have wasted time on a populist cut in inheritance tax 18 months ago, only to propose higher taxes on high-earners now. The truth, surely, is that we don't know what's going to happen. In that context, I have no idea which party will benefit from the recession, and, at the moment, I don't care. “The choice at the next election” claimed Mr Osborne, “could not be clearer.” It could not be more irrelevant to millions who might lose their jobs.

In the meantime, even the economically uncertain can afford an opinion on John Sergeant or Russell Brand, and, like Belshazzar's guests in the Bible, can “drink wine and praise the gods of gold, and of silver, of brass, of iron, of wood and of stone”. But “in the same hour came forth fingers of a man's hand, and wrote over against the candlestick on the plaster of the wall of the king's palace.”

As the Babylon exhibition at the British Museum reminds visitors, the Book of Daniel has the king call upon the prophets and astrologers. “Whosoever shall read this writing, and shew me the interpretation thereof, shall be clothed with scarlet, and have a chain of gold about his neck, and shall be the third ruler in the kingdom.” “Mene, mene tekel upharsin,” reads Daniel. You have been weighed and found wanting.

Daniel, a biblical Robert Peston, gets his promotion. It does no good. “In that night was Belshazzar the king of the Chaldeans slain .” It's only a story. A story about how little we know, sometimes.

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