Like gamblers who cannot accept they are in a losing streak, the political parties took what sparse winnings they made and threw them back on the table instead of banking them.

Whether for students, doctors or married couples, you should not make special cases in a financial crisis because all interest groups can put together an argument that they, too, are special cases. They are usually half right. Pure waste, such as in Labour's disastrous IT programmes, is rare. Most spending has some good effect even if the benefits come at a disproportionate cost. Telling those who work in and use public services that there is no option other than to cut is a harsh business. You have to be able to promise equality of suffering or face a crowd of angry victims who feel that their cogent claim on the public purse has been unjustly ignored at the expense of undeserving rivals.

The election campaign was fought as if there was no need for harshness. Options abounded: an exemption here, a sweetener there and ring-fences being thrown around Whitehall departments faster than barbed wire in a war zone. A £167 billion deficit can be tackled only by raising taxes and cutting spending, and having a vigorous debate on how to generate the sustained growth would provide the revenues to do the rest of the job.

The most unintentionally revealing quote of the past month came from the Tories. Accepting that Cameron's £150 a year marriage benefit may not be enough to persuade blushing couples to head up the aisle or battered wives to stay with their husbands, a party spokesman talked as if the past two years had not happened. "It's not the money, it's the message," he said. The Britain he imagined, or had to pretend he imagined, was not facing a sovereign debt crisis but was a land of plenty that could still afford eye-catching initiatives and expensive gestures. "The skirmishes over tax and spending that we have seen so far during the campaign hardly reflect the scale of the challenge that will face whatever party has the misfortune to emerge victorious," said the normally mild-mannered Robert Chote of the Institute of Fiscal Studies as he turned into the Cassandra of public policy research. On top of the cuts and tax rises already announced, the next would have to find £30 billion in savings, the equivalent of twice the police budget or a £1,100 tax increase for every household. 

In Wolfgang Becker's 2003 film Goodbye Lenin, the mother of the East German hero falls into a coma just before the Berlin Wall comes down. By the time she regains consciousness, Germany is heading for reunification and the communist society she knew has vanished. Her doctor tells her son, Alexander Kerner, that he has to keep her calm or risk another stroke.

"You must protect her from any kind of excitement. And I do mean any kind, Mr Kerner," he says.