THE NEXT PRIME MINISTER?
He still lacks Boris’s easy charm. But this cunning, chameleon Chancellor has won Britain’s respect
THERE is a Greek-rooted word used when creatures shed their skin — ecdysis. Snakes do it, wriggling out of their pelts like Marilyn Monroe alighting from her swimming costume. Velvet worms with their slime glands do it, some spiders do it, the blue crab does it.
And so do the more astute Chancellors of the Exchequer.
It may happen once a year when they give their Budgets, but the process needs to begin months earlier as these rare, complex specimens contemplate the next agile stage of their evolution.
George Osborne is now in the sixth year of his Chancellorship. It is an achievement to survive so long — and he has never looked more secure than he did yesterday delivering his seventh Budget. Mr Osborne remains, at 44, a youthful, vigorous figure. He may well be the next Conservative party leader.
Winston Churchill, R. A. Butler and Roy Jenkins all did shorter stints at 11 Downing Street. Geoffrey Howe and Kenneth Clarke managed four years. Mr Osborne is now on a par with Nigel Lawson (just over six years).
During the decade when Gordon Brown was Chancellor we came to think of the Treasury as a fortress. The Chancellorship was immutable, unyielding, cartooned by Tony Blair (who often felt its force) as the ‘great clunking fist’.
It is a sign of Mr Osborne’s serpentine skills that he has so far escaped easy caricature and has been responsive to events without looking weak.
Sinuous manoeuvres, low-lying stealth, the occasional act of deadly suffocation and venomous guile such as plucking the Left’s Living Wage yesterday from under its nose: by these and other feints and shimmies and stratagems he has proceeded and prospered.
Our friend ecdysis has been essential to the process, for Mr Osborne has used several skins, leaving them behind as shrivelled and spent conveniences.
The Osborne who entered Parliament in 2001 as MP for Tatton was a sardonic nerd, a backroom aide who helped William Hague prepare for his Prime Minister’s Questions appearances. He did not seem born to rule so much as born to act as a clever courtier to bigger men.
HEIR to a 17th baronet of Anglo-Irish lineage, he was called Gideon for the first 13 years of his life. He dropped that twirly Christian name as an ‘act of teenage rebellion’ and chose George in honour of a warrior grandfather. It was, if you like, the shedding of his first skin.
He was educated at Colet Court prep school followed by St Paul’s, a public school which primes youngsters in urbane, wary elitism. Then he collected a 2:1 in history from Magdalen College, Oxford, and bumbled around as a scholarship student in America and a half-hearted, slightly sybaritic freelance journalist on Fleet Street. A relentlessly political young man was cutting through London in those days; his name was Cameron.
The Osborne family was bohemian, its finances flaky. Some months there was not much cash to spare. It all depended on how Sir Peter Osborne’s wallpaper firm Osborne & Little was doing. Young George, whose weight had a habit of fluctuating, tasted economic instability early.
Life did not become much more secure when he joined the Conservative Research Department in 1994 — during the rollercoaster Major years. He became special adviser to Agriculture Minister Douglas Hogg just as ‘mad-cow’ disease struck.
To be a Conservative thruster in those days was to know the uncertainties of a fenland skater in a thaw. Tory fortunes would not solidify for 15 years. Rightwing fundamentalists insisted the party merely had to remain true to Thatcherism. New Labour’s honeymoon would soon end and the Tories would be back, went this deluded theory.
Osborne saw first-hand the perils of political stagnation. Major yielded to Hague, who yielded to Iain Duncan Smith, who yielded to Howard. All failed.
Public contempt for the old Tories was apparent nowhere more strongly than in Tatton, a prosperous part of Cheshire. Scandal-spattered Neil Hamilton had been beaten in 1997 by ‘white suit man’ Martin Bell. By the time Osborne stood in 2001 he knew he had to be a new face — a new skin — for Toryism.
In 1998 he married Frances Howell, daughter of Thatcherera minister David (himself a political survivor). Their first child was born soon after George’s election as MP. Osborne became a junior Opposition Whip in 2003, a Shadow Treasury spokesman the following year, and in 2005 Shadow Chancellor — multiple ecdysis possible only in times of political defeat.
Initially, Osborne and his new party leader (and friend) David Cameron had to cast off the old Tory identity of rancour. They jazzed up their policies and moved to the Centre ground. They accepted Labour spending plans and talked of ‘sharing the proceeds of growth’.
When Brown became prime minister in 2007 they looked momentarily banjaxed and realised that they needed more than a mere political combover.
Politicians are not masters of their destiny. They are vulnerable to the media. Perceptions take time to change. Then there are ‘events’. The banking crisis of 2008 forced Osborne and Cameron (belatedly) to accept that state profligacy had to stop, yet it would take the public time to catch up with the new facts of political life.
As Chancellor, Osborne has changed his emphasis subtly, in relation to the facts of political life. He has seldom led public opinion — the markets have done that — but has been swifter to adapt than others. He has been lucky in his opponents: first Brown, then Balls, and at present no real opposition at all.
LOW points? There was an entanglement with Peter Mandelson and moneybags Nat Rothschild in 2008 on a yacht off Corfu when Osborne was accused of schmoozing a Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska.
The ‘ omnishambles’ Budget of 2012 was a disaster after some sensible standardisation of VAT rates led to a socialmedia storm about a ‘pasty tax’ on hot takeaway food. That same year he was booed by the crowd at the Olympic Games.
Osborne grasped two things: the public supported economic discipline but thought he was a sneery customer, not least because his upper lip has an unfortunate habit of rising at one corner, particularly when he is mocking opponents.
His response, on the advice of his ‘pitbull’ spin doctor Thea Rogers, was to harden his line economically while altering his appearance, losing 2st and changing his hairstyle. His voice, though still metallic and a little dry, sounds less gauche. At the same time, Osborne has constructed a formidable network of ministerial allies and proteges across Government departments, while remaining acidic enough to some of his less cerebral Cabinet colleagues (for instance the brave but unclubbable Mr Duncan Smith) to inspire fear in Whitehall.
As for his possible leadership rival Boris Johnson — at whom he lobbed a couple of jibes about his ‘campaign bunker’ in the Commons yesterday — the comparisons in terms of executive despatch and political organisation are laughable; and yet Boris has charm while George, well . . .
There is a danger of becoming carried away by the idea of Osbornian sway. The much-hailed recovery may be almost as much a triumph for spin as for substance, yet economic success is dependent on confidence and Mr Osborne’s dialectic abilities and his physical and intellectual stamina have been crucial to the stability of both Cameron governments.
The very ‘nastiness’ of Mr Osborne’s persona — the skin he wore from roughly 2010 to 2013 — helped frighten the Left and see off worse public- sector strikes. Now we have an Osborne essaying a more expansive role, claiming the Northern Powerhouse as his own idea and taking it upon himself to admonish the BBC for its ‘imperialism’ (while he eyes up political territory!).
This latest manifestation of George Osborne is not perfect. He lacks much obvious political soul. He is too fast to accept the word of hedge funders and developers and he is too slow to see that a would-be leader of the country needs to project an idea of his or her wider personality.
There remains too little poetry, too little pastoral sunlight, in his political identity. Were he to step out in front of that Olympics crowd again tomorrow I suspect he would still be booed. It is hard for a cost- cutting Chancellor ever to be loved.
Yet the boos might be alleviated now by a greater measure of respect, and a greater readiness to accept that, for all his limitations, and even with that curling upper lip, this man might well one day become our prime minister.