I could barely listen to this morning's performance by the Prime Minister on the Today programme so irritating is his inability to give anything approaching a truthful, principled answer on any question and so painful the contrast with the way his predecessor handled such interviews.
His attempt to suggest that the £2.7bn borrowing was a deliberate measure to give a fillip to the economy was painful. Truly painful.
But I struggled my way though it.
And two points struck me.
The first was that he appears to have changed his investment rule. When John Humphrys asked him about exceeding the public sector debt ceiling on 40 per cent of GDP he interrupted, denied that he was breaking the rule and said that it applied over the economic cycle.
That's funny. I could have sworn that rule applied every year.
If he has changed the rule, he has opened the way to a massive borrowing spree.
The second point concerned the abolition of the 10p rate. He claimed he was doing this in order to simplify taxes at two rates.
Now, this has always annoyed me, because he introduced the 10p rate in the first place.
Until this point, the Government had a response to any smartarse who mentioned the fact that Brown had introduced the rate. No, they said, he didn't introduce it for political reasons (to make himself look like a low tax Chancellor) and he didn't abolish it for political reasons (to make the Tories look silly and cut the basic rate).
Instead he did it for principled reasons. He wanted to help the poor and do it quickly. As tax credits didn't exist he put the 10p rate in place, always intending to replace it later when credits could do the work instead. And in his last Budget that moment finally arrived.
Really. That was their line.
But there's a problem, you see. That line was fine (ish) when they were planning to compensate everybody by changing the tax credits system. But now they have done it a different way - through tax allowances. And that method, of course, was available to them in 1997 when they introduced the 10p rate.
Indeed Andrew Dilnot at the Institute for Fiscal Studies urged them at the time to use allowances and not complicate the tax system.
So Alastair Darling's emergency Budget has destroyed Brown's alibi.
He now has no defence against the charge that his introduction and abolition of the 10p rate were political stunts.