Alistair Darling: Do You Really Want To Hurt Him?

I looked at all the headlines today for the first time in about a fortnight, and everybody's pretty well sick of the government. Those who aren't, seem to be grasping for something else to talk about, to waste the jury's time. PoliticsHome offers the 'first poll since the Budget' and it suggests that most people found most of the measures reasonable, but they don't believe anything the Government predicts, and the biggest issue on their minds is the stupefying scale of our debt. Hence, the return of a 20-point Tory poll lead is cantering up to the horizon.
The public don't seem to bear too much of a personal grudge against Darling, though. Perhaps they find him largely pitiable, soon to be out of a job like so many of us. Perhaps they're just relieved it's not Fred Goodwin who's keeper of our nation's purse-strings.
Anatole Kaletsky in the Times has defended Brown once or twice in the last 12 months, a form of seppuku in certain social circles, so I read a piece of his deriding the Budget from top to bottom with great interest. Somewhere near the top, he tossed away the merest notion that Cameron didn't have any better ideas, and one was slightly interested to see that all the comments his piece had attracted were from a gaggle of little Tory-Boy online invigilators crying 'How dare you? Prove it!' etc etc.