Britain’s busiest MP Osborne joins the press

No one could claim the MP for Tatton has solid journalistic credentials, said the Daily Mail. At Oxford, George Osborne briefly edited the student magazine, Isis, covering such topics as hemp and the Marquis de Sade. He then tried and failed to get on a trainee scheme at The Times. So when it was announced last week that he’d been made editor of the London Evening Standard, there were cries of disbelief in Westminster and Fleet Street. “This just tears the arse out of what’s acceptable in terms of outside jobs,” moaned a senior Tory. Not that there’s anything wrong with MPS taking on extra-parliamentary work, said The Times: “it can be a valuable bridge to life beyond Westminster”. But Osborne “has stretched the principle to breaking point”. Besides getting £800,000 for speech-making, £120,212 for a Kissinger Fellowship, and a £650,000 salary for advising the fund manager Blackrock, he’s launching the Northern Powerhouse think tank, and writing a book. Now this. His constituents deserve better.

It’s not the multitasking that’s the main issue here, said the FT. It’s the conflict of interest. Every day there will be stories in the Standard – about a parliamentary scandal, say, or a financial regulation – from which Osborne, as an MP and a City consultant, will have to recuse himself. Quite simply, he “cannot serve as an effective and ethical editor while doing either one of his other jobs, let alone both”. There’s so much wrong with this, “I don’t know where to start”, said Labour MP Jess Phillips in The Observer. Osborne says his “only interest” now is “to give a voice to all Londoners”. So much for safeguarding the interests of his Cheshire constituents, and his professed concern for a Northern Powerhouse. And “what a smack in the face” his appointment is for all those hardworking journalists struggling to re-establish the public’s trust in the integrity of news reporting.

I don’t deny Osborne’s ethical flaws, said Polly Toynbee in The Guardian. He was a mean-minded chancellor, notorious for “kicking the weak” and “shredding public services”. But finger-wagging about his dual role as politician and editor is “hypocritical cant”: Britain’s press has had Tory owners pushing a Tory line for as long as I can recall. And if his aim, as many suspect, is to use the Standard as a pulpit from which to “stiffen the backbone of Remain Tory MPS, to take back control from the Brexit extremists”, we should hold our noses and say, “go for it, George”. All the more so, said Matthew Parris in The Times, as the Tory party is now “in thrall to its own right wing”: any dissent is slapped down as “subverting democracy”. A politician with serious things to say now has to look beyond Parliament to say them. The trouble is that, like Tony Blair, Osborne has “great arguments” but isn’t the man to make them, said The Observer. “The tangle of ethical interests”, the vast lot of money he’s accrued, make him too easy a target. Taking this job may have looked a great “wheeze”, but Osborne’s wheezes, like his referendum arguments, “have a habit of falling apart”.