Last week, Simon Jenkins identified a new threat to national security — the Axis Of Gloom. 

Economists, historians, philosophers, bishops and Marxists, he said, were all engaged in “a silly and damaging exercise in talking down confidence” in the economy.

As coalitions go, this one’s a corker. Arguably, it contains more ideological discontinuities than President Bush’s Axis Of Evil. (Have Eric Hobsbawm and the Bishop of Manchester got less in common than Kim Jong-Il and Bashar al-Assad? Of course.)