It was only eight months ago that Danny Alexander, as Treasury chief secretary in charge of public spending, was directly involved in planning the Budget. So last week, at The MJ's first Future Forum North in Leeds, Sir Danny – now a knighted, ex-Lib Dem MP – had a rapt audience of chief executives when he gave them his views on the chancellor's Autumn Statement.

Firstly, Sir Danny pronounced the age of austerity dead and buried after Osborne's unexpected burst of generosity across most parts of the public sector except local government. However he qualified his comment by saying we were now entering ‘the age of scarcity', a phrase he thought up the previous evening, he later told me, and it was going to ‘last a long while'.