There is something to be said for understatement at a time like this, where we have run out of superlatives. “In an ideal world,” Alistair Darling said this week, “you would not want to be in this position.”

Well, no, you wouldn't, would you? In an ideal world, you would not have near-bankrupted the country by gambling on a mountain of debt. In an ideal world, we would not be pumping hundreds of billions into a black hole of a banking system while unemployment heads for two million. And in an ideal world, we in the UK would not be answering the inauguration of Barack Obama as the first black American president by hailing the return to the Tory front bench of the former Chancellor, Kenneth Clarke, MP. Our answer to yes we can: yes we Ken.

Mr Clarke has been in the House of Commons since 1970, before four of the present Cabinet were a year old. Nobody doubts his capacity to enliven British politics in the short term but nobody would suggest that he has much to offer for the longer term. This is not because of his age in itself but because, as he himself likes to boast, he's been saying the same things for years and he's not going to change now.

But in the meantime, the world has changed. We cannot meet the Barack Obama “BlackBerry” generation with a generation of politicians who still consider the text message a bit of a modern nuisance. Mr Obama has refused to give up his BlackBerry on taking office. The hot challenge for the Conservative whips this week has been how to persuade Mr Clarke to use his.

These men from the 1980s and 1990s - Mr Clarke, Lord Mandelson, Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling, Vince Cable - are well placed to look backwards. The Conservatives had to call back Mr Clarke because it was Mr Cable, of the Liberal Democrats, and not George Osborne who was making all the running. That they are 9 to 13 points ahead in the polls, despite having a Shadow Chancellor who lacks credibility at a time of great economic crisis and a leadership team widely seen as remote from ordinary people, shows just how much trouble Labour is really in. “Clarke's return kills ‘toffs' and it kills ‘novice',” said one adviser this week. “You look at that team now and you think, ‘yes'.” And that was an adviser to Mr Brown speaking.

The next election, and the generation after it, will be won not by the politicians with the best critique of the economic situation, but by those who enunciate the hopes of the next generation. Mr Obama seems only to stand there to do that; he symbolises change. Mr Cameron is currently the only widely recognised British politician who possesses a bit of the same magic. Mr Clarke is an enjoyable sideshow; Mr Cameron is still the real Tory story in town.

And Labour appears to be in freefall again; not even the excitement over President Obama's inauguration can hide that. “I don't know why anyone thought that people were going to be grateful for the fact that the economy is going down the spout,” conceded one Labour strategist this week. He added that he thought that if the polls got worse month after month and end in wipeout in the local and European elections on June 4, Mr Brown could yet face a leadership challenge.

But does Labour have a Barack Obama of its own? The most hotly tipped contender is Chuka Umunna, the charismatic Labour candidate for Streatham - although that may be partly because Mr Umunna is black.

And he is only 30 and not yet an MP, which is obviously a problem. What Labour urgently needs, then, is for some of its most promising young ministers to shine brighter. A Fabian conference at the weekend showcased two of these, Ed Miliband and James Purnell, likely to be among the leadership contenders when the time comes (and, in my opinion, one of them will win). They both took as their founding premise what is becoming Labour dogma: that the financial crisis rebalances the relationship between markets and the State. For these two men, the credit crunch combined with Mr Obama's election represents a huge opportunity for progressive politics.

It's become a sort of mantra - the moment for transformational change and all that. But what exactly do they mean by it? The answers are fuzzy at best: as Mr Purnell put it in a speech to the arch-new-Labour Progress group, we must be progressive, for the many not the few, pro-business, match rights with responsibilities, match investment with reform... not really stirring stuff.

Mr Miliband has a touch of the Obama magic about him, but the message is still unclear. In his speech to the Fabians, he emphasised government's role in shaping markets but also, crucially, “a different kind of State”. “We cannot leave in place the old idea that power is concentrated and not dispersed,” said Mr Miliband. The very fact that that represents a big step forward from traditional Brownite dogma that the Centre must have total financial control shows how much farther they have to go.

Ministers talk enthusiastically about giving individuals control over their own social care budgets or giving more financial power to youth mayors - about making a difference locally, rather than grandstanding with great constitutional reforms. It's not all that exciting but it is of a different generation and order to Mr Brown with his top-down centralised view of politics.

“It's about how you talk about these things,” one minister put it yesterday. “We need to talk about what people value in life. We need to be able to paint a picture of society as we move forward.” Can you see Mr Brown or Mr Darling doing that? Is there any way that they can “own the future”, as the Americans put it? There is something to be said for understatement. But there is a lot more to be said for inspiration.

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