Super-Gordon couldn’t be with us at PMQs for he had been called to Brussels. The Eurozone economy was in trouble. Earlier in the week he’d single-handedly saved the British banks and so he wasn’t surprised when he’d got the call on the Batphone. (All the superheroes are pooling resources in this global crisis.)

“This is a job for Super-Gordon!” he’d said to Sarah who looked at him adoringly while packing him an extra pair of underpants and giving his cape a quick ironing. “Let Harriet do PMQs.”

But Harriet isn’t a super-hero. Gordon tried to send her on a training course, for he needs a sidekick, but Harriet refused when she discovered that Superman only had one real female sidekick: her name was Supergirl and she wore a mini-skirt and red go-go boots. Harriet, super-sensibly, was having none of it.

The result of all this is that Harriet has no super-power “skills base”, as they say in new Labour. This quickly became obvious yesterday. First up was Ronnie Campbell, an old Labour type. “Could I ask the Leader, who’s obviously sitting in Superman’s seat, could she look at the small business sector?”

Harriet the Human said the Government would do “whatever it takes”. She kept repeating this without saying what “it” might be. Super-Gordo would not have made such a basic error: he would have told us how he, personally, was going to save every firm.

Up popped Super-Hague whose golden tongue has made him rich. “It is a grim day for the British economy,” he intoned, adding that unemployment was up by 164,000, the biggest rise in 17 years.

But Harriet didn’t like that word “grim”. It was, well, grim. She said unemployment was not as bad as it was in 1997. Then she added: “We are not complacent at all about the situation.”

Superboy said she did, actually, sound complacent. Harriet insisted she was not. She admitted the economy faced “hard times”. But then she rallied: “But nor should he write our economy off. Our economy is made of sterner stuff.”

Super-Hague warned against boastfulness. Taxes had increased, debt had risen remorselessly, unemployment and inflation were up. “Isn’t it time to acknowledge that the claim to have abolished boom and bust was one of the most foolish, one of the most hubristic, one of the most irresponsible claims ever made by a British Prime Minister?” demanded Super-Hague.

Harriet wanted to say something really really powerful in rebuttal but, of course, she couldn’t. “I think this is a serious moment for the economy,” she noted to Tory mockery. “But you should not write Britain off. The Prime Minister will take action to protect this economy. You could possibly say that, in that respect, he’s a man with a plan.”

This was a joke - for it was David Cameron who had claimed to be a man with a plan - but it fell flat, for Harriet is no Joker.

She was beginning to wish she’d just stayed quiet and worn the darn go-go boots. Her ordeal was not over for Mr In-Vince-able arose from the Lib-Dem benches with more grim tidings. She batted him down. “I get a sense that you don’t realise that there is a very real emergency,” Mr In-Vince-able chided.

Harriet was getting increasingly frustrated at the way these comic book types kept trying to blame the Government. “The economic circumstances that face this country, although they are national in their impact, are global in their origin,” she insisted though hardly anyone was paying attention now. If only she had go-go boots, I thought, it could have been so different.

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