If Alistair Darling is still a happy man then he would do well not to show it too publicly. Nobody appreciates a Chancellor of the Exchequer whose demeanour seems at odds with the accounts. And it has been his misfortune to pick up Gladstone’s battered old hand luggage just at the moment when the headlines are suitably Dickensian. We appear to be in for hard times, not great expectations.

If it is any comfort to him, he should reflect that few Chancellors who held office for any great length of time over the last 100 years did so without their programme being offset by an economic downturn at some stage. In this respect, it is probably better if the problems come at the outset than the sunset of a spell at the Treasury.

Unlike the world wide depression Neville Chamberlain had to confront in 1931 or even the recessions dominating the Chancellorships of Sir Geoffrey Howe and Norman Lamont, these downturns have generally been of relatively short duration. But they were usually sufficient to throw a spanner in the works of the best Treasury economic models and ensure the abandonment of policies predicated upon eternally growing tax revenues.

So while Darling actually finds himself in good company among his predecessors, his narrow room for manoeuvre only really appears startling because an almost unprecedented 15 years of continuous growth has got us out of the habit of expecting the effects of the trades cycle every four or five years.

Background

• UK novice bosses 'ill-equipped' for slowdown

• Hospital and road plans hit by credit crunch

• Tax rise for drinkers in a Budget for trouble

• Powerful MPs attack the Chancellor's domain

• UK financial status under threat

Darling and the ghosts of Chancellors past

With limited horizons and little room for manoeuvre, Darling is in territory familiar to most post-war Chancellors

Background

• Alistair Darling’s budget will appease non-doms

• Darling under pressure over non-doms and CGT

• Bankers warn Treasury on Rock backlash

• Non-dom rule proposals 'old Labour'

• Chancellor to exclude Rock in Budget

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• Budget Quiz 2008: answers

That ’stop-go’ was once the unlooked-for motto of economic management seems now as remote as the language of incomes policies and exchange controls. Yet while Darling will not fall back on the latter measures of restraint, the prospects of low growth, City nervousness and even inflationary pressures have returned all the same.

Like the Chancellors of the 1950s and 60s, Darling starts with the advantage of an economy providing something close to full employment. Unlike them, he has an additional benefit in being less constrained by the straitjacket imposed by a fixed exchange rate. Their hands became tied at the first sign of a balance of payments crisis. It is some time since that once alarming phrase has even been heard, let alone feared.

Yet, whatever their local difficulties, past Chancellors like Peter Thorneycroft and Roy Jenkins as well as Kenneth Clarke and Gordon Brown between 1993 and 2007 presented their Budgets against a background of generally favourable global conditions. This is not the case now.

The precedent Darling will most want to avoid repeating was that epitomised in 1972 by Edward Heath’s Chancellor, Anthony Barber. Attempting to head off the anticipated effects of soaring energy costs and financial turbulence in the City by a crude 'dash for growth’, Barber ended up bequeathing his Labour successor, Denis Healey, an economy that many contemporaries assumed was going the way of Weimar Germany.

The task on the eve of a recession is always the most difficult conjuring act for any Chancellor: how to give a last-gasp stimulation to growth without so unbalancing the finances that, come mishap, more severe measures will later be needed when tax revenues collapse. As a result, the 2008 Budget will almost certainly have greater repercussions than any delivered by Gordon Brown. For Darling finds himself in the territory occupied at some stage by most post-war Chancellors. It is one of limited horizons and minimal margin for error.

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