Osborne’s attacks on the Tories are an act of betrayal
ONE person above all others has been diminished by last week’s general election but it isn’t Theresa May. It is George Osborne. It is incredible to think that just a year ago he sat at the top of government, the favourite to succeed David Cameron when, as was expected, the then prime minister retired in 2018 or 2019.
This weekend his fall from grace was completed when he appeared on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show to describe Theresa May as a “dead woman walking”.
This, on top of the Evening Standard headlines he penned last week describing May as the “Queen of Denial”, among other things.
If Theresa May is a dead woman walking, I hate to think where that puts George Osborne – perhaps a ghoul howling from the political graveyard in perpetual anguish at his unfulfilled ambition.
I am sure that Osborne feels bitter about his brutal sacking as Chancellor by Mrs May last July. But it is a disappointment which countless other ministers have suffered over the years – and mostly without the need to carp vindictively from the sidelines as Osborne is doing.
David Cameron, too, must feel bitter at the manner of his exit from Number 10. But he has kept a dignified silence ever since. Mrs Thatcher was not exactly the most graceful loser after being forced from office in 1990. But whatever her private thoughts she kept out of the subsequent general election campaign and allowed her successor John Major a free run.
WHEN past leaders and ministers have intervened they have mostly done so by donning the mantle of elder statesmen: giving a balanced view as to why they think a particular policy is wrong. Many will disagree with John Major’s interventions on Brexit, for example, but the manner in which he has delivered them has earned him widespread respect on both sides of the argument.
Yet from the moment George Osborne left the Commons he has missed no opportunity to try to undermine the Prime Minister. On his first day as editor of the London Evening