Chloe Smith handled a difficult deployment pretty well

I woke this morning to hear that the junior Treasury minister Chloe Smith had been comprehensively pulverised on Channel 4 News last night over what was deemed to be a hopeless defence of George Osborne's decision to reverse his budget judgment and freeze £550m-worth of fuel duty. Jeremy Paxman apparently put what was left of poor Smith through the Newsnight food processor before bedtime.

Poor Smithy. Deployed as an expendable, sent out to be bashed up by those bullying blokes on the telly like one of those "pointless sacrifices" troops were called on to make in the first world war. Why hadn't the chancellor done his own dirty work and faced down Paxo and C4's Krishnan Guru-Murthy himself?

After finally catching up last night on Laura Wade's brilliant polemical play Posh – a satire on the Bullingdon Club and its embattled sense of entitlement – I was primed to share the tweeters' sense of outrage. There's a character in the current London production, one of the least attractive characters in a field of 10 young brats, who kept reminding me of Osborne.

There's also a young barmaid, Rachel, exposed to their snooty, loutish ways. It could be you, Chloe, being battered by a gang of sneering public schoolboys – by George, by Jeremy and, yes, by Krishnan. And they seem to have missed the point.

In truth, it is one of my top tips for aspiring political journalists never to watch Newsnight or read the Sun unless you absolutely have to, because they're both self-important bullies – one upmarket, one downmarket – that distort the big picture.

I feel warmer towards C4 News. But radio is usually faster and smarter, cheaper too, unless you need to judge what impact any relevant pictures are likely to have, for better or worse. I heard Smith on Radio 4's PM and no, she wasn't playing a weak hand especially well. More of that in a moment.

It's common in politics to see junior ministers dispatched to the Commons dispatch box, the TV or radio studio to defend unpopular policies, just as it is in business, sport or other endeavours where the old "pointless sacrifice" joke works too. Sometimes there's a good reason – the boss is busy elsewhere or too valuable to be exposed to gunfire, the junior minister may even be the one who took the fateful decision.

Gordon Brown used to do a lot of buck-passing when he was chancellor, dispatching Dawn Primarolo – the Chloe Smith of his team – to the Commons to explain away some cock-up. I was delighted to see Primarolo's photo in the FT last week, credited with an offensive against tax-dodging that got little attention but put the fear of God into the tax-dodging industry, albeit temporarily.

In fairness, Osborne made yesterday's announcement to MPs at Treasury question time – you can find it here in column 146, and Simon Hoggart's take here. The cabinet doesn't seem to have known, and Tory MPs were still being advised to attack Labour "hypocrisy" in urging the freeze (the fuel tax rise was inherited from Labour) two hours before the house sat.

Perhaps the secrecy reflects the half-baked, hastily improvised U-turn that Paxo and co suggested, driven by fear of a defeat at the hands of Tory fuel populists in a vote that Labour fuel populists were organising for next week. I'm sure that's part of the story, but so must be the knowledge that, if the budget proved two things, one was that you can't trust the Lib Dems with a secret (the other was that Osborne changes tack under pressure).

Anyway, later I watched both the Newsnight and C4 interviews. It made me even more sympathetic to Smith and even more determined not to waste any more of what remains of my life watching Newsnight. No wonder, Paxo sounds so bored, sneering and boorish. I suspect he is fed up with the programme too, but can't kick the fat pay cheque – rather larger than Smith's.

Clearly Smith didn't know much and couldn't – more likely wouldn't – answer questions about where the money would come from. Paxo wanted to know when exactly she had known about the decision, and kept on about it. Good bear-baiting stuff, but boring. "It's not what you said in May," he reminded her, when all Smith actually said in May was that "it's not certain that cutting fuel duty will have a positive effect on families and business".

I'd hardly call that dogmatic, would you? And a lot of bad stuff has happened since May, including Sir "Misery" Mervyn King's warning (again) yesterday that things are still getting worse. Keynes once said: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?" The U-turn lark is much exaggerated, including by Fraser Nelson, editor of the increasingly rightwing Spectator, who is clever enough to know better but can't resist joining the Newsnight-Ed Balls consensus.

At least Guru-Murthy got briefly to the point, a point that should have interested Newsnight's economics guru Paul Mason, who is a clever leftie but referred to the cost of the unfunded freeze as "£550bn" (whoops!). "What this is is a little fiscal stimulus, isn't it?" Guru-Murthy remarked.

Exactly. The left has been urging a tax cut of some kind – VAT or fuel duty (as Balls did in yesterday's Sun) – as part of a wider attempt to get money moving in the economy and being spent more usefully than making rich Arab oil producers even richer so they can buy up more of our assets on the cheap. Declining world oil prices – a side-effect of falling growth rates – are helping recovery and easing inflation.

This is good. But instead all we get is "U-turn, U-turn, U-turn" and grainy clips of Margaret Thatcher saying "the lady's not for turning", when anyone who remembers the Thatcher years knows that she turned whenever there wasn't a better alternative and made no fuss about it. Smart woman. It's playground stuff and the crisis deserves better.

As for Smith, I thought she handled Paxo's bullying pretty well in tricky circumstances. I bet plenty of Newsnight viewers who don't tweet or blog into the night thought so too. She even managed a putdown and a smile or two. Well done, Smithy.