Osborne went considerably off the leash with his claims, saying that Labour secretly planned to raise income tax, and implying that civil servants had, in allowing the plans to be forged, given up something of their political impartiality. Stung, the servants told Osborne to drop the Hardy Boys schtick – the “secret plans” were actually in the public domain as part of the Budget, and the increase in income tax was tied to the ongoing growth in the economy.

He’s set in motion the kind of political Pokemon battle we get every election cycle, where each side fires its rhetorical magic at the other in turn, until one of them emerges the victor – so much for Osborne’s recent condemnation of electioneering. But with his vicious fireball deflected by the backroom staff, he was left dangerously exposed over the weekend. Mandelson, I choose you!

The business secretary and veteran political warhorse described Osborne thus: ”Like a boy in a man’s job”. Saucer of milk, etc etc, but while we wait for the homophobic reaction that dogs Mandy’s every move (let alone when he’s talking about boys and men) David Miliband has also slagged Osborne, describing him as “not a serious person”. He described the Tories’ tactics as “juvenile and student politics…the politics of the big lie and the big smear”. Treasury Chief Secretary Liam Byrne added: “this truth problem for Mr Osborne is becoming a pattern of behaviour”. Vince Cable meanwhile has managed to get mileage out of both his opponents in a single sentence, saying: “The public doesn’t need George Osborne’s imaginary secret documents or conspiracy theories to work out that the public finances are in a bad shape”. 

The Tories were also hurt by the Lib Dems rooting through their post-election plans and finding over £50bn of spending pledges that don’t really chime with Osborne’s prudence – new-school policies like high-speed rail sit next to classic Tory stances like cutting inheritance tax.

While it’s all good fun to see the internecine bitchery of The Hills get transplanted onto the UK’s political scene, this all seems like a case of electioneering distorting the genuinely necessary action. Cuts will be an inevitable part of the next government, whoever it is – the public discomfort at a rocketing deficit can’t be ignored. But the need to score points off and differentiate themselves from Labour has drawn the Conservatives, and to an even greater extent the Lib Dems, towards a economic model based on arch prudence. This is framed for maximum gain as brave and wise, positioned opposite Labour’s supposed recklessness with the public balance sheet.

But it’s too soon to make cuts, and using them as such a hot political topic is dangerous; fiscal stimulus needs to carry on for some time yet. Keynesian economists like Robert Skidelsky and William Keegan have written over the weekend about the importance of letting fiscal stimulus continue, Skidelsky with a simplicity that is either charmingly optimistic or dangerously reductive depending on your leanings: “Had the Government given everyone a spending voucher of £500 last Christmas, the chances are we would have had no output gap and full employment today!”

But for all the weirdly mechanistic and presumptive nature of Keynes, his ideas are still valid, and to ignore them for brief political gain would be disastrous. The recent crowing about the end of the recession, along with the City-minded political economists, means that talk of cuts might not seem too premature, but if the stimulus is cut back before much of the country has had time to feel it, then any future government could find itself with a hole where its income tax should be. Once the economy is genuinely growing again, with consumer spending steady, then we can start worrying about the deficit. At the moment, all the talk of cuts is only benefitting political strategists.

In this report by KPMG, they outline their research into the renewable energy mergers and acquisitions market; they surveyed 200 senior executives from “power-generating businesses, renewable energy suppliers, energy distributors, oil and gas majors and financial investors”. And for the UK, the results aren’t that great. Only Malta and Luxembourg generate less renewable energy than us at the moment, but we’ve got the highest targets for 2020. And while Germany and Italy earmarked over $100bn in their financial stimulus programs for tackling climate change, we only managed $30bn. So we’re mostly hoping that private investment, the great third way, will want to set up chez Blighty. But investors would rather go elsewhere first.

The problem first of all is the fact that the UK is encouraging investment in sites and setting up wind farms from scratch, which is seen as too risky and massive an investment at the moment: “Assets actually generating electricity, rather than shares based on promises in the wind, are what investors are seeking”. In other words, investment in big capital projects is likely to happen only by being funded through a massive company that’s sold off assets and is cash rich, has amassed bargains and is milking revenue, or has the clout and willingness to take on a big loan. 70% of smaller companies surveyed said it was harder to secure financing at the moment.

And more generally, the UK just isn’t as attractive to investors as other parts of the world. 42% of respondents said they were going to invest in the US next year, 24% in India, and 22% in China, but only 13% of them said they’d be investing in the UK. Suddenly Darling’s assertion that we’re “the world leader in offshore wind power generation” seems like a poisoned chalice. Considering an offshore wind farm is much more expensive to set up than an onshore one, investors in the current climate are far less likely to invest in offshore, if they invest at all. The UK is going to have to get over its NIMBY attitude to onshore wind farms, or face a reluctance towards any investment at all.

Still, as Deutsche Bank’s Brett Olsher notes in the FT: “In the UK, we’ve alreadt seen high levels of M&A activity in the nuclear energy space. This is where the development has been, and will continue to be in the medium term.” So at least Miliband’s beloved nuclear plants might get built, if nothing else.