This year’s Booker International prizewinner, ‘A horse walks into a bar’, follows the routine of an over-the-hill stand-up comic as he coaxes and manipulates his audience, painfully aware that one failed joke could send the entire act crashing through the stage floor.

I often wonder why modern politicians don’t take their cue from stand-up comedians. While much of what they say and do is laughable, they never seem to be afraid of wheeling out the old, failed one-liners. And, unbelievably, far from throwing rotten tomatoes, their constituents and the international community at large lap up their corny nonsense.

For example, did you hear the one about the French Finance Minister who walked into a press conference …?

Following five years of clownish misrule by socialist Francois Hollande, last month France’s independent auditor uncovered a budget shortfall of seven billion euros. Meanwhile, France has failed to meet the EU maximum deficit requirement of 3% of GDP every year for the last decade – a target that is particularly important for the stability of the single currency. And, then there is the protected labour market, with maximum working hours and early retirement, to name but two loony-left policies.

All that misery led the new Prime Minister to announce earlier this month that President Emmanuel Macron’s campaign-promised tax cuts would have to wait until 2019 while the government set about balancing the books. That invited an immediate reaction, not from the opposition, but from the government’s Finance Minister, evidently acting with the backing of his boss’s boss. According to the quickly revised script, the first stage of the planned reduction of corporate tax from 33% to 25% would go ahead next year – down to a cordon bleu, mouth-watering 28%. Meanwhile, housing taxes would be reduced, and there would be a reform of wealth tax (the latter would be delayed).

The amazing thing is that the Finance Minister declared that the required budget deficit target would still be achieved in 2018 – the gap evidently to be closed by the expected additional tax revenues from the economic growth arising from the change. You can fool some of the people all of the time. History is full of no-hope fiscal promises from governments. A larger than expected deficit, plus labour rigidity that will take years to unravel, would be a no-brainer to any tenth-grade pupil who could think past his infatuation with his teacher. Short of a miracle – like the bonanza of more than a billion euro back-taxes the French courts refused to sanction from Google last week, or the Finance Minister getting lucky with the country’s foreign currency reserves on the tables at Monte Carlo – the deficit target is going to be missed once more.

I realize that politicians, more than most, do not like to be bearers of bad tidings, but what about the French equivalent of the man on the Clapham omnibus? Do people really just hear what they want to hear?

While governments and their cohorts can, at a price, mess with the money supply and the amount of fiscal spending, as well – in fairness – as tax policy, they clearly cannot micromanage the annual tax-take.

Lousy one-liners aside – in politics, like in stand-up, it is all a matter of timing…..