As Labour MPs called for his resignation, the chancellor had the chutzpah to say UK growth forecasts are better than Germany's
Just before George Osborne was dragged to the chamber to talk about the loss of his cherished bauble, our triple-A rating, we had defence questions. Philip Dunne, a minister, mentioned "HMS Bollock, er, Bulwark!" There was the familiar pause as MPs asked each other if he'd really said what they thought he'd said, followed by a great shout of gleeful laughter.
Moments later they were bellowing something different as the chancellor rose, and it was not gleeful laughter. Mr Osborne has dropped the biggest possible bulwark, having bizarrely tied his reputation to a rating administered by one of three discredited agencies, who entirely missed the 2008 banking crisis, and two of whom are now facing legal action in the US, as Jacob Rees-Mogg, the only baby whose bootees came from Lobb of St James, was eager to inform us.
"Resign!" "Humiliation!" and again, "Resign!" shouted Labour MPs. Mr Osborne could bow to the inevitable – a sort of double dip of shame, I suppose – or he could brazen it out. You will not be surprised that he chose the latter.
It turns out that the triple-A rating, once the only benchmark of the government's success, is of no importance at all! There were loads of other indicators all of which pointed to the genius that is Osborne. The value of sterling was stable– stablish – on Monday (he didn't mention that's because it had crashed on Friday night), gilt sales were booming, the FTSE-100 soaring, tea-leaves were propitious, and a close study of the heavens showed that the stars were onside too!
He even had the chutzpah to say our growth forecasts were better than those of Germany and France! And if there was a problem, which there wasn't, not really, it was Labour's fault. What we needed was more of the same. As Ed Balls put it: "He said he must stick to his plan to avoid the downgrade. Now he says the downgrade means he must stick to his plan!" The shadow chancellor said Osborne was "baffling, illogical, and making it up as he goes along".
To be fair, Osborne wasn't smirking, so at least MPs didn't face the dangers of passive smirking. Instead he was doing furious. How could anyone doubt him? He was backed up by a phalanx of Tory MPs, most of whom had been dragooned into making supportive comments. It wasn't always easy. Pat McFadden asked if the chancellor agreed with himself, that it was a humiliation? Geoffrey Robinson, who used to run Jaguar and knows his stuff, said that as long as he stuck to counter-productive policies, there was no hope for any of us.
Osborne said he resembled an arsonist telling the fire brigade they were not putting out the blaze fast enough. Dennis Skinner said that if Osborne were a football manager, he'd have been out already. John Mann said that at the next cabinet meeting he should quote Capt Oates: "I am going out. I may be some time." Paul Flynn said the country was run by an "ineptocracy".
Osborne boomed angrily at them all. Tory backbenchers joined in. They may be taking a different view in the tea room. George Osborne's rating was never triple-A. As old teachers used to say, it could now be gamma-minus.