Balls and Cable? Osborne really is scraping the barrel

Boy George must be getting desperate. The Chancellor yesterday wheeled out Ed Balls and Vince Cable to support the Remain campaign.

It can’t have escaped his attention that both Labour’s Balls and the Lib Dems’ Cable lost their seats at the last election. If voters weren’t prepared to return either of them to Parliament, why does he think people will take any notice of what they have to say about the EU?

Not so long ago, osborne was warning anyone who would listen that a Labour government with Balls in the Treasury would be a sure-fire recipe for economic disaster.

Balls came to prominence as Gordon Brown’s bag man and is credited with writing that hilarious speech about ‘post neo-classical endogenous growth theory’, which he copied from an episode of Bill And Ben, The Flowerpot Men.

We’ve already had Gordon banging on about why we should vote Remain. Bringing on the monkey when the organ grinder has left the stage smacks of After The Lord Mayor’s Show. That sound you can hear is a rather large barrel being scraped.

Balls was also up to his neck in the MPs’ expenses scandal. He and his wife Pixie Balls-Cooper flipped their address three times to maximise their allowances and claimed £14,000 in travel expenses for their children.

With uncontrolled immigration one of the main issues in the referendum, it is also worth reminding ourselves that Pixie announced grandly that the Balls family would be inviting a Syrian refugee family to share one of their own two beautiful homes — a promise she has subsequently reneged upon.

AND here we were thinking the reason Ed hadn’t been seen in public for the past few months was because he was busy redecorating the spare room for their new lodgers. As for Cable, he spent five years in Coalition trying to scupper the Tories. While Business Secretary, he flogged off the Royal Mail for a song, costing taxpayers billions of pounds in lost profit.

He made no secret of the fact that he thought he would make a much better Chancellor than Boy George. By all accounts, osborne rubbished St Vinny in return at every opportunity.

yet now George would have us believe that when it comes to the EU, Cable’s is a voice we should take seriously. you also have to wonder what’s in it for Cable and Balls.

I should imagine that osborne is the Tory that their parties’ members despise the most — the man they see responsible for the ‘savage cuts’ in public spending and ‘tax cuts for the rich’. How will Labour and Lib Dem voters react to the spectacle of their boys hobnobbing with one of the pillars of the Bullingdon Club?

There hasn’t been a line-up like it since Ken Clarke and Michael Heseltine shared a pro-EU platform with Tony Blair after the 1997 election. Euro-fetishism does throw up some strange bedfellows.

Cable has been shunted off to the Lords, so he’s already set up for life. Maybe Balls fancies a crack at becoming a European Commissioner, the traditional lucrative sinecure for failed domestic politicians and the main reason so many of them favour Britain’s continued enslavement.

The EU is a purely political project, by politicians, for the enrichment of politicians, freed from the need for accountability to the great unwashed.

Frankly, I found it difficult to suppress a belly laugh when I switched on Sky News to see osborne, Cable and Balls striding towards the microphone like a lowbudget remake of Reservoir Dogs.

It wasn’t just the sight of these bitter political rivals lining up together in common cause to badger the British people into submitting to decades more membership of an anti-democratic, corrupt European superstate.

It was the choice of venue, too, which tickled me. osborne had decided to hold the press conference in an aircraft hangar, in front of a Ryanair plane.

He had also enlisted the support of Ryanair owner Michael o’Leary, arguably the most hated businessman in Britain this side of Philip Green, famous for treating his mug customers with undisguised contempt.

only yesterday it emerged that the airline could face court action over the outrageous hidden charges it imposes on passengers, including an extortionate £160 to change a name on a ticket at check-in.

More than 5,000 people have signed up to a class action against Ryanair, which is accused of wrongly levying charges totalling £315 million over the past six years.

I wonder how many of them will be willing to trust Irishman o’Leary’s judgment about the need for Britain to stay in the EU.

Away from yesterday’s circus, osborne is clearly pinning his hopes on the public buying Bank of England governor Mark Carney’s doomsday warning about the consequences of voting Leave.

It is reported that Carney sees the Bank as a stepping stone to his ultimate ambition of becoming Prime Minister of his native Canada.

In which case, someone should ask him: if the EU is such a wonderful utopia, does he think Canada should apply for membership? After all, if Australia can enter the Eurovision Song Contest, why shouldn’t Canada join the EU?

HALF of them speak French already. The Quebecois would feel more at home in Europe than they do alongside their fellow Englishspeaking Canadians. If not the EU then, given that his country’s main trading partner is America, does Carney think that Canada’s laws and immigration policies should be dictated by unelected bureaucrats and judges in Washington DC?

Maybe if the U.S. could wave through to Toronto all those illegals crossing the Mexican border, Donald Trump wouldn’t have to bother building his wall.

Somehow, though, I don’t think advocating surrendering Canada’s sovereignty to the United States would be much of a vote winner.

The other man with Prime Ministerial ambitions of his own is, of course, George osborne. But one thing which is becoming patently clear is that win or lose, he’s not going to get the job when Call Me Dave calls it a day.

Desperately posing alongside washed-up rivals like Balls and Cable in an attempt to bully the British people into voting Remain is hardly going to endear him to a majority of Tory MPs, let alone the overwhelmingly anti-EU activists in the wider party.

But he knows that to win the referendum, the Government will have to rely on Labour and Lib Dem voters.

The truth is that whatever happens on June 23, Ed Balls stands a better chance of becoming Prime Minister than osborne.

Still, Boy George’s new best friend Christine Lagarde, the former French finance minister, can always fix him up with a job at the IMF.

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