IT hasn’t been a great couple of weeks for David Cameron, what with one of his mates having to resign and people not doing what they’re told over this pesky Europe business.

Rumour has it the bloke still hasn’t turned up to fix the Downing Street central heating, despite saying he’d be round last Tuesday between twelve and four.

The Prime Minister is probably feeling as cut up as the nation’s credit cards would be if he had his way.

Mr Cameron is sometimes accused of being out of touch with the general public, and, by suggesting people’s flexible friends should be involved in an unfortunate collision with the garden shears, he severely underestimated Britain’s almost wartime-esque spirit when it comes to consumerism. Because when the going gets tough, the tough go shopping.

Or, to be more precise, they go mental-spending. This is the retail equivalent of electronic cigarettes; it ensures you don’t have to forfeit all the pleasure while being able to convince yourself you’re not causing any real damage.

The downside, of course, is that dragging a mouse across a clothing website and clicking away like you’re trying to send a message through Morse Code after 17 cans of Red Bull, while thinking of all the things you COULD buy in some parallel shopping universe, is no substitute for the real thing.

In these times of being constantly blasted with messages about the need to be frugal, mental-spending is torture. Torture laced with enjoyment, but torture nevertheless.

It’s a devil on the shoulder, coaxing you towards a wraparound dress, a pair of shoes, a new top, a pair of shoes, a blazer which will be great for occasions, but also work great with jeans, a pair of shoes or a pair of shoes.

Fighting it requires extreme reserves of willpower and self-reminders that spending money on treats isn’t necessarily a wise move at present. But that brand of resistance simply isn’t within everybody’s power. And as somebody who can rack up a mental-spend basket with a value roughly the size of Italy’s national debt in a remarkably short space of time, I can testify to how dangerous this particular territory is.

What Mr Cameron also fails to appreciate is that he’s asking us to give Barclaycard the chop just as the crafty Lords of Mental-Spending have made life even more agonising for the weak, innocent consumer by the most cunning and dastardly of tactics: putting stuff cheap on eBay sites.

When I discovered LK Bennett – by the way, their York shop is very convenient, lovely layout, friendly and helpful staff; cheers, girls, I’ll be in at 1ish on Saturday! – had such a site, among other retailers, it was like a whole new world had opened up. And that’s when you fall into the trap. There are motorways shorter than my list of desired purchases from various eBay-related emporiums at the moment.

Add the arrival of iPads, which allow a portal to the realm of mental-spending to be carried around at all times, and it’s like being surrounded. It’s one of life’s ironies that there suddenly seem to be so many new and convenient ways of spending lots of money just as we’re being told we shouldn’t be spending lots of money, or maybe any money.

Shopping was actually more difficult when the country was supposedly rolling in it.

The fact is, mental-spending is recession-proof; no amount of dire forecasts and gloomy warnings are going to deter us from running the rule over an autumn/winter collection and trying to blur the lines between ‘need’ and ‘want’.

Mental-spending is as safe as you want to make it, but it’s not something which should be entered into lightly. It takes you to a line in the sand which, once crossed, puts you in a very different place called actual-spending.

Still, as that renowned expert on financial management, Dolly Parton, put it: “If you want the rainbow, you’ve got to put up with the rain”.

We might mental-spend to convince ourselves we’re being responsible. But even austerity sometimes needs a screen-break.