It was almost possible to feel sorry for Mike Whitby, the Tory leader of Birmingham City Council, and his Liberal Democrat deputy, Paul Tilsley, at the cabinet meeting called to recommend a £320 million cuts package over the next four years.

Both men, in their own inimitable macho chest-beating style, have been putting it about in recent weeks and months that they have been pleading Birmingham’s case for a fairer deal at the very highest level of Government.

Coun Tilsley has tirelessly name-dropped about the important meetings he has been having with the likes of Vince Cable and Nick Clegg, where he went into great detail about why Birmingham, with all of its deprivation and unemployment, did not deserve to be clobbered quite so hard by spending cuts as other towns and cities.

Coun Whitby has been no less hard working in his networking efforts with Conservative Ministers and the Prime Minister, David Cameron.

He even sacrificed the comfort of his own bed for a suite at the Hyatt Hotel during the Tory conference so that he could be on hand for urgent talks with the Government. Greater love hath no man etc, etc.

But the hand-wringing and the pleading got Whitby and Tilsley absolutely nowhere with Cameron and Clegg.

In fact, you could argue that Tory-Lib Dem controlled Birmingham appears to have been singled out for particularly vindictive treatment.

Eric Pickles, the Local Government Secretary, famously said he was “delighted” that Birmingham was to suffer cuts of £130 million in central government grant and told Whitby to his face that he’d be lucky to have cheese straws at council buffets next year.

As things stand, make that just straws.

When the small print of the Comprehensive Spending Review was examined, it became clear that Mr Pickles was deadly serious. Birmingham was given not a sniff of the help offered to some Tory-run councils in the south of the country, or to some Labour-run councils as it happens.

Specifically, Birmingham will have to sacrifice £21.6 million of grant which will be redistributed to councils in need of special support.

Quite how a city with the highest unemployment levels anywhere in the country ends up handing over grants to other authorities, it is difficult to say. Since 2005-06, Birmingham will have contributed £156 million of grant money to supposedly more deserving councils.

The current formula for working out grant funding was invented under a Labour government, but, sad to say, the system appears to have been embraced without much change by Mr Cameron’s Tory-Lib Dem coalition.

Nor has this city benefitted from a Government transitional fund established to assist local authorities whose spending power has fallen by more than 8.8 per cent. Birmingham’s loss of spending power is calculated at 8.3 per cent, against an average reduction across the country of 4.7 per cent.