Boy George has launched a secret weapon as the battle of the cuts turns into all out war. Bumbling Brown hardly had time to draw breath before shadow chancellor Osborne blew the gaff with secret treasury documents showing two-faced Brown has misled MPs and the public over spending cuts.
Revelations came in the proverbial 'brown' envelope - how apt. Telling it like it is on the Today programme, Osborne revealed the leaked treasury documents show Brown "was planning near 10% cuts in departmental spending" at the time when he had the audacity to attack Tories over similar plans.
Osborne has hit Brown's Achilles' Heel. The muddled mess of nasty Tory Mr 10 percent 'cuts' vs nice New Labour 'investment' went deep. Brown's Tory 0% cuts vs his 0% rise was silly. None of it cut any ice. Thanks in part to vindicated Fraser Nelson's number crunching and graphs over at the Spectator it was exposed as a sham.
The treasury leak, shown in full gory detail here, led to a gleeful Osborne accusing down-in-the-dumps Brown of misleading the commons, misleading the public and telling porkies about his own budget. Voters knew it all along but it tastes good to have all the Brown sauce out in the open with official confirmation. Another nail in the coffin of trust.
Silly-Billy-no-mates Brown's begrudging bleating out the C-word came as a little light relief in the middle of the dismal dance of the living dead but all a tad too late. It had about as much taste as a limp lettuce.
Political posturing over 'cuts later' is the easy option for a fag-end government faced with slashing spending after more than a decade of a £3 trillion wasteful spending spree.
As the Orange Party posted yesterday, the eye-watering £175 billion national debt begs the questions of who, what, where, when and how will the axe fall. All in a grammatically incorrect sentence.
The Orange Party is starting to warm to Boy George who's stuck his neck out and long-warned of the dire state of the country's finances. He gets it in the neck a lot from enemies in the City but that's par for the course with the on-going cat fight and dark briefings from Pussycat Peter.
Osborne did raise a few true blue eyebrows when he let slip the cuts axe could fall on £30 billion worth of big ticket defence projects, seemingly oblivious to the fact that most were already in the pipeline.
Way to go, Leftie. A £20 billion useless Eurofighter/Typhoon project to bait the Russian bear, £4 billion earmarked for two shiny new aircraft carriers to fly the flag and £2.7 billion for a couple of dozen transport aircraft to bring the boys home in a box.
What's the point of more Eurofighters and whooping big aircraft carriers, apart from sucking up to cronies in the defence industry?
Throw in scrapping £20 billion worth of Trident and pull out of the wasteful unwinnable Afghan War and it's a deal. But that's a tad too left of centre, even for the new progressive Boy George.
The Times splashed with a pop at Osborne over defence cuts to keep old guard Tory readership sweet, dragging up an unnamed Tory frontbencher to call Boy George names like "amateurish". But Osborne had the killer punch of a treasury bombshell up his sleeve.
What short memories they have anyway. The days of Brown's Navy Cuts still stick in some throats. Wasn't it Brown who cut defence spending by stealth before the Afghan chickens came home to roost?
The cuts axe has to fall heavily, so why pay lip service to the dying days of Empire?
The Cold War's over. Modern warfare is about helicopter support, boots on the ground with the right kit and special drones to blast the hell out of innocent civilians without getting your hands dirty.
And it makes a change from the usual stomping ground, droning on about health and welfare benefits.
Back in the real world there's only one real issue. Today unemployment tops 2.47m, a 14 year high. Now New Labour will be going into a general election with the shame of 3m on the dole, despite more desperate fixes to fiddle the dole figures.
Bunkered Brown should have listened to the political strategists and the Orange Party and called that election sooner, instead of bumbling around, borrowing and bottling it. But that would have called for a trusted leader with the best interests of the country at heart to avoid a total wipe-out.
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