By James Cusick, Westminster Editor

CONFUSION reigned yesterday as Chancellor Alistair Darling backtracked on his warning that Britain faces its toughest economic crisis for 60 years.

The confused messages from the Treasury were rounded on by critics last night after they watched Darling forced to give a series of television interviews to alter the hard-line warning he had given in a newspaper interview.

With Treasury advisers saying the chancellor's doom forecast did not mean recession in the UK, Darling said his focus was on the "unique problems" facing the "global economy".

With Darling himself criticising Gordon Brown's government over the past year for failing to communicate with the electorate, the LibDem Treasury spokesman, Vince Cable, said this latest confusion was "yet another example" of Labour's inability to explain what it was doing.

Although Darling told The Guardian, on August 19 and 20 in an interview held at his home on Lewis in the Western Isles, that the "economic times we are facing" would be "more profound and long-lasting than people thought", he gave an interview only a day later to the local Stornoway Gazette, in which he said he thought "the economy will keep on growing" and that he "didn't agree there is going to be a recession."

The shadow chancellor, George Osborne, said the optimistic and pessimistic forecasts couldn't both be true, adding: "We need to know who is telling the truth at the top of the government."