Watching Gordon Brown blustering away in the House of Commons the other day, refusing to admit in any open sort of way that he'd got his forecasts wrong, only confirmed what some of us have suspected for a long time: that the man isn't half as good a Chancellor as he's been cracked up to be.

Ifhe was, the Government wouldn't need to be borrowing billions just to keep society more or less ticking over. If he was, he wouldn't need to be taking £5 billion a year out of private pensions funds. If he was, then during nearly nine years of New Labour rule he would have done a damn sight more than the Tories did earlier to ensure that more money, and particularly the revenue from Britain's oil and gas which has now nearly all gone, was put in to building an infrastructure that would serve the country well in what will almost certainly be a tougher future.

Instead he's encouraged a prolonged consumer boom to keep the economy buoyant, as did his predecessors, without apparently pausing to ponder on how long we can keep going by selling imported goods to each other.

And he's poured money into allegedly improving public services, although only 35 per cent of it has actually got to the sharp end and as cash-strapped hospitals postpone operations to the new financial year, community bus services fold, failed street lamps galore remain in darkness, paedophiles go unmonitored because there aren't enough police to do the job, and schools are forced to reduce the number of teachers they employ, you're bound to wonder how well spent that money has been.

This wounded but still-roaring lion was never going to balance the books, even before the country was saddled by Blair with a costly foreign war.

You would think, then, that the Opposition would find something to rage about in all this. But did they?

Politicians don't rage nowadays.

They score points, with undisguised glee.

That's what George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor and key sidekick of David Cameron, the Tories' big new hope, was doing as he confronted Gordon Brown during this pre-Budget debate. He made some good points, but he did so jeeringly with the smug, self-satisfaction of a precocious sixth-form debater getting one over on his opponents.

Where's the anger? Where's the sincerity?

Where are the words that come straight from the heart?

Politicians don't seem to do that sort of thing any more. Conviction politics belong in the past, at least at the top of tree (the exceptions are among backbenchers). Now the commitment extends only to the ambition to be elected or re-elected, power for the sake of power.

Watching Brown and Osborne facing each other across the Commons the other day, and realising that these two represent the crème de la crème of British politics, three words kept flashing across my mind: God help us!