Steve of Sparta

Maybe it's not Harper's fault. Maybe he just missed the lecture about coming home with your shield - or on it.

The way a lot of prominent Cons are dissing Harpo over his half-assed stimulus budget, you would think he'd been caught buggering the Bishop.

It's plain that, to a lot of Stevie's nearest and dearest, the far-right clique that floats in the shallow end of the Conservative gene pool, their guy should have said "no deficits" and stared down the opposition on a confidence vote.

But Sad Steve realized that would mean his cherished, gummy government would fall and his cold, discredited corpse would be ferried home atop his shield. When it comes to that sort of thing, Steve is no Spartan. Harp doesn't mind spartan spending, especially on social programmes, but standing like a Spartan - not so much.

Steve dropped his shield and fled but, like a coward, he didn't have the courage to do the right thing either. Instead he introduced a miserable, horribly flawed stimulus/deficit budget that, by virtue of his total lack of vision, will wind up heavy on the deficit and very, very light on stimulus.