George Osborne, the Austerity Chancellor: a Biography
by Janan Ganesh, reduced to a manageable 400 words
John Crace, Guardian, Oct 21 2012
“This is the unavoidable budget.” So began George Osborne, attractive in an ethereal way imaginable only to a Financial Times journalist suddenly let loose with a thesaurus, in his first speech as Chancellor of the Exchequer, which marked the arrival of one of the world’s most gifted politicians on to a world stage etc, etc. Gideon Osborne, or Giddy as his friend Matthew Slotover used to call him, was very much a freewheeling child of a postmodern, post-national London. Although born to a baronet, the title was very much at the lower end of the aristocracy, and Giddy could clearly see a council estate from the bedroom of his well-appointed London townhouse. At the age of 12, Gideon decided to change his name to George. A number of theories have been advanced as to why, but having examined all the evidence I can confidently conclude it was because he had realised there had never been a Chancellor called Gideon and that if he was to fulfil his destiny as one of the world’s most etc, etc.
At school, George excelled at everything, and from an early age his teachers realised he knew everything about everything. “To be honest, he was a bit of a know-all twat and no one liked him very much and he had no real friends,” one of his acquaintances didn’t tell me, and it was no surprise he was elected to the Bullingdon Club at Oxford. “The Buller” has been much discussed in recent years and its members maligned as upper-class idiots, but while that may have been true of some, my own research has revealed that Osborne only joined the Bullingdon because he didn’t want to upset those who had nominated him. Like many other cosmopolitan free spirits, Osborne slept with anyone drunk enough to say yes and though the photograph of him with a dominatrix and a pile of cocaine is entirely innocent, he did mix with many diverse people. Mysteriously, though, he ended up working in Conservative Central Office and hanging out with people exactly like him. For much of his early career, he pondered the fissiparous nature of the party as he made the coffees for anyone in a position of influence.
Some people have observed that Osborne has never had a proper job in his life and is therefore unqualified to do anything, but Osborne has always believed that this quality is precisely what makes him such a gifted politician. And I tend to agree. “It is far better to know how to knife your colleagues in the back to gain power than to understand a brief,” he once drily commented to a colleague with a knife in his back. The years of Tory opposition hardened Osborne’s resolve that saying anything to get elected was far better than having sincerely held beliefs, and after becoming MP for Tatton, a constituency he didn’t even know existed, still less wanted to visit, he set about making himself indispensable to the upper echelons of the party, politicians who would soon prove all too dispensable to one of the world’s most, etc, etc. Having worked for brilliant men, such as Hague, Duncan Smith and Howard, Osborne aligned himself to David Cameron and the magnificent, pre-eminent modernising of the Tory party into early 19th-century feudalism took shape. “Leave the economy to me, Dave,” he said at their first meeting, as he picked up a copy of Economics for Beginners. There were mishaps on the way. His decision to holiday with Oleg Deripaska was perhaps ill-judged, even though my research has revealed their only discussion was about a mutual interest in Russian history. But for the most part there has not been a single political event about which Osborne has not been preternaturally prescient. And so it was that the country breathed a huge sigh of relief when the world’s most gifted etc, etc took charge as chancellor to steady the ship through times of turbulence with his decision to cut the deficit at the expense of growth, an approach heartily endorsed by, um, no one.
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