One thing is clear from the Tory blogs, Osborne did not do well in the Chancellor's debate

Looking through the main Tory blogs tonight, not one posting has been done after the Chancellors debate on Channel Four.

Now if Osborne had done well or even slightly well, the Tories would have been crowing about it. Their silence speaks volumes about Osborne's performance.

Should we be at all surprised ?

So after the budget we are all worse off. Any surprises in that ? I would hope not. The fact is this country's finances are in a mess and more needs to be done about it. The problem we have is that nobody trusts the Labour government to do anything about it and finding anyone who has any real faith in the Tory alternative, George "Gideon" Osborne is like looking for needle in a haystack.

The long and the short of it is that the one person people do trust to tell the truth is Lib Dem shadow chancellor Vince Cable and the only way you will get him in number 11 Downing Street is to vote Lib Dem.

In the meantime, take with a pinch off salt the fake shock from the Tory press that the budget has left people worse off. To deny that the budget would be anything other than one that would make us all poorer in the short term is the very worst kind of politics, but something that the likes of the Daily Mail indulges in every day.

Taking Labour's Bitter Pill Will Not Make Us Better

To hear Labour big guns being rolled out to speak to the press over and over again over the last two days since the pre budget report has been a lesson in how to sound if you have run out of ideas.

In the last 24 hours I have heard Alistair Darling, Jack Straw and the quite awful Ed Balls all defending the PBR on the simple basis that "the Tories would be worse". This quite pathetic defence just highlight how vaccuous Labour are now and how utterly bankrupt they are in the ideas department.

So what will the polls make of it ? I cannot see anoything other than a decline in Labour's support on the basis that the PBR was not good for most people and it actually fails to address the urgent needs of the country.

People an accept a bitter pill if it will make you better. But as the BBC reports tonight, Labour's measures will do nothing to solve the crisis in the public finances whilst everyone will be feeling the pinch.

The stupidity of Alistair Darling

Alistair Darling admits that "we may be entering a recession". What an absolute tit that man is. Is he to reveal next that the Pope is a Catholic and that bears shit in the woods ?

When he is trying to justify spending hundreds of billions of pounds in borrowed cash to stimulate the economy, you'd expect him to know whether or not we were entering in to recession long before now !

Osborne's last ill thought out hurrah

There is a general unwritten political convention that opposition party spokesmen don't talk down the economy or make statements, often based on their privileged position and inside knowledge, that will damage employment, sterling, and the economy as a whole.

A few months ago the Conservatives has a real dig at Alistair Darling for stating the obvious when he said the recession would be worse than expected. Strangely though, George Osborne's memory seems very patchy because not only does his recollection of his holiday Corfu differ from the one his host recalled, despite him leading the criticism of the Chancellor a few short weeks ago, he has now broken the convention I mentioned earlier by seemingly talking down sterling in what many are saying is a last desperate attempt to prove his relevance to the Tory Party.

Perhaps as others write, it is a last hurrah in an attempt to head off his replacement by Ken Clarke.

From failure to humiliation and on to gross stupidity - Labour's 10% solution is a massive failure by every measure

The humiliation of Labour under Gordon Brown today was complete when Alistair Darling announced a £120 tax give away for this tax year (and this tax year only) to anyone on 40% tax.

Whilst Frank Field and other Labour rebels might be delighted, the whole principle of what Labour have done "sucks" in so many ways.

The main point for me is that this re-hash of the budget had to be done because Labour had failed to protect those who deserved protection most. Low wage earners would , as a matter of principle, be the last to be made to suffer in difficult times, and Labour, in a pre-meditated way planned to rob them and cared little until the polls showed that they had seriously cocked up.

The other reason why today's plan is so daft is because people like me, who benefited from the Labour budget and the cut of 2% in income tax, will gain twice. Oddly when the poor were being fleeced by Labour, I was made slightly better off, and now the poor are being re-imbursed, I too get a further boost to my income. This really is a daft form of logic.

The truth of the matter is though that Labour have lost the plot. You've just got to hope that the electorate will not be so dumb as to fall for it.

What did Alistair Darling say ?

I watched Sunday AM this morning which featured Iain Dale, amongst others, but the main political heavy weights were Gideon Osborne and Alistair Darling.

For all my disbelief in anything Gideon Osborne says about the Tories caring for low wages earners (wasn't it the Tories who opposed the minimum wage ?) and my recollection that the Tories said next to nothing last year about the 10p tax cut, only realising in the last few weeks that it is an issue of significance, the one major asset Gideon Osborn has over Alistair Darling is that at least he keeps his sentences short and at least he alters the tone of his voice. In short, I can listen to Mr Osborne without drifting off to sleep.

Alistair darling has the completely opposite effect on me.

I don't know how many times Andrew Marr had to ask him over and over again if he accepted that the budget had made 5 million people poorer, but as far as I could tell all Alistair Darling did was repeat the same list of "New Labour achievements over the last 11 years" over and over again, ad nauseum, until quite frankly I lost all interest in what he was saying.

If it isn't bad enough that he seems to have no idea how to control the economy, he then waffles on to such a degree that nobody is interested in what he says. It's no wonder the banks left Downing Street last week and put interest rates up rather than down.

In the end I really could not remember anything Alistair Darling said.

How many times will Alistair Darling re-announce things from the 2007 budget on budget day this year ?

Much like most fly on the wall type documentaries like Wife Swap. Location Location Location and You Are What You Eat, the Labour Party do like to repeat the same point over and over again just in case you miss something, or in many cases to patronise.

The lifestyle shows I mentioned always tell you what will happen, then before every break tell you what will happen next followed by a return after the break telling you what has already happened, before the whole process is repeated again, meaning that in any 30 minute programme, there is actually only about 12 minutes of programme, the rest is just resumes and reminders. As so it is for Labour.

Gordon brown has a terrible tendency to re announce policies year after year just in case we are stupid enough not to remember and there is little reason to believe that Alistair Darling is any different.

So how many times will they mention this year that income tax will be cut by 2% ? How many mentions will the rise in inheritance tax get ? Remember, these were announced last year. But what will they forget to mention ? I doubt that the axing of the 10% tax band will get as many mentions as the income tax cut of 2%. Likewise, you can expect a re-announcing of the increase in ISA limits that were first announced last year.

I'd love to be surprised and not hear another set of recycled announcements, but alas, after 11 years in government it all sounds so tired from Labour.

Was Hillary Benn making a plea to save Alistair Darling ?

Looking at the BBC website earlier it was odd to see two stories that were unrelated to each other seem to overlap.

Firstly, there was this story

Which seemed to imply that Alistair Darling, often referred to as "the Badger" because of his grey hair and black eyebrows, was effectively a "dead man walking"

Then there was this separate story

And in this story Hillary Benn is suggesting that culling badgers is not the answer.

Was Hillary Benn making a plea to save Alistair Darling ? Perhaps I need to go to bed early, but I thought the two stories seemed strangely parallel.

Sunday Caption Competition - Alistair Darling

This is easy, an open goal of a caption competition.

Give us your finniest caption and you win a visit to the Oxford Union. Don't worry, you'll get there because you will be taken there by TNT parcel delivery.

Please note, for legal purposes there is no prize.

When you've cocked up after so many second chances, sometimes you have to go

Let's face it, the inevitability of someone losing their job sometimes makes the news of it happening seem like more of a relief than anything else. Sometimes they fall on their swords themselves, sometimes, stubbornly, they need a push.

After being given another chance after the previous debacles, after letting millions of people down, after showing a spineless lack of urgency in dealing with the problems in hand and in the way that there appears to be a complete lack of vision, it is only right that "he" goes.

Now as for the "he", please insert the words "Alistair Darling" or "Steve McClaren". Either name fits the description.