Gibbering Gideon's hot air Budget

George Osborne's pathetic attempt to justify yet more ideological cuts was akin to a drunken surgeon saying: "Well, yes I did take the wrong leg off, but only to the knee," before adding: "What are you complaining about? You should see what I did to a bloke last week. Well, he was a bloke…"

It'll take more than lopping a penny off the price of a pint to make this gaggle of grotesques likeable. In fact they could give a free pint to everyone in the country - although it might be wise to exempt Eric Joyce - and they'd still be despised.

On Osborne's watch the figures have been massaged more often than a loyalty card holder for a Bangkok brothel.

As this column has previously observed with regard to David Cameron's Tory conference speech last year, if the guts of it can be put out on Twitter in 140 characters or less beforehand it can't be up to much.

Osborne was slapped down, for the second time, for leaking the details of his speech to the (relatively) tame media, although even the Daily Mail and the Sun hate him which, for a Tory Chancellor is surely the semi-literate scrawling on the wall.

Tory diehards were probably hoping for some brilliant and incisive resolution to the country's ills, however that was about as likely as an England football team winning the World Cup.

Instead we got the same old lukewarm verbal diarrhoea with a snake oil salesman trying to sell it as medicine.

When Osborne talks, ad nauseum, of there being no Plan B it's not because he believes in Plan A - it's just that he's too thick to come up with anything else.

And while we're on the subject, what kind of a bloody phrase is "aspiration nation" anyway?

As far as this column can see, his only aspiration is to cling to his job until the next election and it wouldn't put money on him achieving that either.

"Aspiration Nation," I ask you, what are we going to get next? "The Unlikely Kingdom" the "in principle principality."

Aspiration can mean hopes, dreams etc, etc, yada, yada, yada. But - and this is a more accurate definition - it can also mean a loud exhalation of hot air.

Hot air is all we ever get from both sides of the house these days. The place is littered with braying bumblers and Grand Guignol gibberers.

On a similar note, it is interesting to note that, in the week that we mark the 10th anniversary of the commencement of the (still) ongoing slaughter in Iraq that more and more then Cabinet figures are crawling out of the woodwork to - ahem - admit that they were "misled" into voting for war.

It's funny how many of our senior politicians were "duped" into supporting the murderous invasion when millions of us ordinary folk knew exactly what was going on, and told them, repeatedly.

And talking of controversial imperialist interventions, newly disclosed papers from the Thatcher era show that even a sizeable proportion of her own Cabinet opposed the Falklands invasion, saying variously that they weren't worth the bother and that it would make Suez look sensible.

Thatcher of course ploughed on regardless in her bloody-minded determination to emulate Churchill as a war-time PM and get herself re-elected on a tide of jingoism.

Now who does that remind you of?

Blair has said he has given up trying to justify the decision to invade because no-one listens. Well, now he knows how the entire country felt in 2003.