Alistair Darling may have been a big, brave Hector standing up to nose-tweaker Brown, but his right-hand minister at the Treasury is a more timid piece of work.
Liam Byrne is Treasury Chief Secretary - the Treasury's hatchet man, the minister who gets to say 'no' to extravagant-spending departments.
A strong chief secretary can save the country billions. Past chief secretaries have been flinty, muscular thrusters, rooted in actuarial propriety.
They have often been seen as future leaders of their party. Mr Byrne is a less obviously steely fellow. Not one of life's leaders.
He is a courtier, a massager of clients, a service provider, follower. Yesterday he was queasy about using the language of cuts.
He, more than most mortals, must know the danger of our national debt. Yet he pansy-tiptoed around any idea of reducing that debt. He wouldn't even talk about 'paying off' the debt.
Instead this former management consultant, this Blairite careerist who only joined the project half way through the New Labour years, spoke of ' paying down the deficit'. Sounds less assertive and dynamic and decisive that way, see?
He was speaking to the Public Administration Committee. Its chairman, Tony Wright (Lab, Cannock Chase), has on occasion taken a jab or two from my nib for being too soapy, but yesterday he flew at Mr Byrne with gusto.
Mr Wright was trying to reconcile the vast national debt with Gordon Brown's desire to carry on spending. It was, said Mr Wright, 'just not sustainable' to claim you could fill a £73billion hole without damaging public services.
Mr Wright shook his head as though troubled by a bluebottle and said Mr Byrne was pretty much talking baloney.
Mr Byrne again: 'I don't think that's a sophisticated enough way of looking at it.' Mr Byrne argued that because Labour had given public-sector workers such hefty pay deals over the past 12 years, only they could now tell those same public-sector workers they had to accept a pay freeze. Shades of a protection racket here, surely.
Mr Wright yelled: 'This is broken Britain. Just drive around and you will find it.' He quoted numerous independent witnesses who insist public services must be cut severely.
Mr Byrne waved aside these claims. He sat there between two Treasury aides, small, very white, like a golf ball in a carpenter's vice. He was a maestro of mumbled waffle. Here was the Chief Secretary of the Treasury, the man we look to as the protector of our tax money, pooh-poohing the idea of cuts.
Ah-ha! So there WILL be cuts. But he was just reluctant to say so - for fear, pretty obviously, of losing public-sector votes.
I realised that the last time I saw that zoned-out calm was on the face of UFO-fancier David Icke during the Haltemprice and Howden by-election.
The received-wisdom merchants, encouraged by anti-Cameron loonies on the foaming Right, frequently attack the Tories for not presenting us with detailed spending plans.
In fact no Opposition can feasibly do so, partly for political reasons, more bluntly because they don't know how many land mines are buried in the Treasury's accounts.
Perhaps the useful idiots of the Thatcherite Right should follow the example of Tony Wright and get stuck in to our current rulers, not least Mr Byrne.
What does the Brown Government intend to cut? When? How deeply? Come on. Spit it out.