George osborne

George Osborne: I tried to swap jobs with William Hague

I could be that rare thing: a former chancellor who is still a member of the Conservative party. Philip Hammond has lost the whip and will be expelled if he stands for election again. Ditto Ken Clarke. How times change. I remember a time when we were desperate to get Ken into the tent, not kick him out. Back in 2008, we wanted him to join our shadow cabinet. Tory wars had consigned us to opposition and we needed to end them. The negotiations were conducted in secret in case he said ‘no’, so we agreed to meet at my house rather than Westminster. It was all very cloak and

Striking the wrong note | 18 July 2019

Every summer for the past six years, Bayreuth has risen to its feet to acclaim an English Brünnhilde. Catherine Foster, from Nottingham, was the heroine of Frank Castorf’s anti-capitalist staging of Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle. The director was booed to the rafters, the singer hailed as saviour. Three perfectionist conductors, Kirill Petrenko, Marek Janowski and Christian Thielemann, insisted on her return each year. Across Europe, Foster commands the roles of Elektra, Isolde, Senta (Flying Dutchman) and Turandot. At 44, she is approaching her vocal prime. So it is a bit odd to find that no British company has offered her a leading role, or presently plans to do so. Six

George Osborne has nothing to offer the IMF

Smooth. Intelligent and articulate. A former finance minister. A European. And perhaps most importantly of all, a mildly irritating potential rival to the prime minister of his own country. In lots of ways, George Osborne ticks all the boxes to replace Christine Lagarde as the managing director of the IMF. Indeed, if you were looking for a perfect replica of the incumbent, minus the pearls and the elegant neck scarfs, you might well settle on the former chancellor. The trouble is, while Osborne’s brand of centrist Conservatism might suit the Fund in easier times, what it needs now is radical change – and the editor of the Evening Standard has

George Osborne’s curious criticism of Roger Scruton

In November last year, a row kicked off when the government asked the philosopher Roger Scruton to chair the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, which will investigate the beauty of architecture in the UK. The 75-year-old philosopher was criticised by opposition MPs in the Commons for remarks he had made in the past about homosexuality, Islamophobia and alleged anti-Semitism. Now, fresh scrutiny has been applied to the government’s decision once again, after Scruton gave an interview in the New Statesman in which he repeated some of his more controversial remarks. The government have since axed Scruton as an advisor. However, many are still questioning why Scruton was appointed to the position in

Diary – 29 November 2018

I got the sack the other day from the London Evening Standard, where I’ve been a weekly columnist for about a decade. ‘Belt-tightening’, I was told: Osbornean austerity claims another victim. As Fleet Street sinks giggling into the sea, a mini-tradition is emerging for long-serving hacks to grumble in the Spectator diary about losing regular work. Here, in recent months, have been Rachel Johnson (heave-ho from the Mail on Sunday) and Lynn Barber (heave-ho from the Sunday Times), so it was nice of the editor to offer me the opportunity now it’s my turn. Distinguished company, and the ritual serves everyone. As Kingsley Amis wrote: Life is mostly grief and

BlackRock in the spotlight

A few months ago, an aggressive US pressure group called the Campaign for Accountability declared that it had a new target: the Wall Street behemoth BlackRock. Quickly, the American press picked up on this campaign against excessive corporate power. Soon we were reading about how BlackRock, like Goldman Sachs before it, ‘rules the world’. Despite BlackRock’s supposed omni-potence, it is relatively unknown in Britain. It might be the biggest private manager of assets in the world but, in political terms, the company has existed in relative obscurity. That is, until last year, when it handed George Osborne a £650,000 contract for giving ‘advice’ one day a week. In recent months,

Has HMRC done enough to solve the botched implementation of child benefit charges?

You’ve just had a baby. Life is upside down, but in a good way. A couple of months in, you are talking to your antenatal group and someone mentions child benefit. It’s not something you’d have thought you’d be eligible for, as you and your partner earn too much to get any benefits, as a rule. You go to the HMRC website, fill out the form and get a letter back. ‘I am writing to tell you that you are entitled to child benefit at £20.70 a week’, it begins. ‘Brill, that will pay for the nappies’, you think. So you take it and you are £1,076.40 a year to

Osborne at a loss over Evening Standard

Evening Standard editor, Kissinger Fellow, Honorary Economics Professor, Blackrock Advisor and Stanford Visiting fellow George Osborne is a skilled man at many things – namely job applications. However, as Chancellor Osborne struggled with deficit reduction, repeatedly missing his targets. He seems to now be experiencing economic turbulence in one of his new jobs, as editor of the London Evening Standard. BBC Media Editor Amol Rajan reports that in the space of a year the Standard has gone from a two million pound profit to a ten million pound loss. The paper will post a loss of £10m for the year ending in September 2017. Osborne started at the paper as editor

May is finally embracing Osborne’s agenda

Here are the two words that matter most in today’s Spring Statement: “balanced approach”. Those words appear five times in the official text of Phillip Hammond’s speech, and I suspect we’ll hear them again through the course of this year and beyond. Here they are in context: “We will continue to deliver a balanced approach. Balancing debt reduction against the need for investment in Britain’s future. Support to hard-working families through lower taxes. And our commitment to our public services.” In terms of macroeconomics, this is a possible signal that in the Budget in the autumn, Hammond will finally yield to arguments that have been made in No 10 and elsewhere

Diary – 25 January 2018

We Citizens of Nowhere have made our home in Davos this week. Where else? Those who think we’re a remote global elite hiding away behind barbed wire in a luxury Swiss ski resort have decided to travel all the way here to tell us. Shadow chancellor John McDonnell is braving the Glühwein to lecture us on Marxism. Theresa May is back, flush from her successful outing last year when she warned the audience here that they’d lose elections unless they understood how out of touch they’d become. Donald Trump is swapping cheeseburgers for Swiss fondue on his mission to put America first. They are all welcome. Davos Man understands that

George Osborne’s freezer lesson

With Jeremy Corbyn too anti-establishment to speak to the Parliamentary Press Gallery over lunch, George Osborne was hauled before lobby hacks today as the alternative opposition. The former Chancellor didn’t disappoint with his address. The former Conservative politician – and now Evening Standard editor – accused the Tories of ignoring the 48pc Remain voters in the country, said Labour would be 20 points ahead of the Tories if they had a competent leader rather than Jeremy Corbyn and hinted at a comeback to politics – saying ‘never say never’. As for his old foe Theresa May, Osborne said that he didn’t think May would have the numbers for a ‘hard Brexit

The universal credit crunch

It only dawned on me in late summer just how terrible our new benefits system, universal credit, might be both for the poor souls who depend on it and for the bedraggled Conservative party. An old friend, Terry, alerted me to the depth of the problem. Terry is 70-odd and has learning difficulties, though he’s astute in many ways and quite startlingly kind. He has a room in a shared house, but like many in precarious or temporary housing, he’s a regular on the homeless scene: part of a growing drift of men and women who move around London morning till night, from the St Martin-in-the-Fields day centre to the

Rattle’s hall

Even in a Trump world where reality is what you say it is, the London Symphony Orchestra’s announcement of a new concert hall occupies a bubble of pure fantasy. New York architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro have been awarded a contract for a project that has no funding. Concert hall, what concert hall? The only cash on the table is £2.5 million from the Corporation of the City of London. The hall is hot air. There has been no public consultation, no actuarial study of demographic need, no consideration of best possible sites or size. There is not even a consensus within the classical sector that a new hall is

George Osborne’s revenge on civil service bean counters

Since George Osborne moved to the Evening Standard, the one-time austere chancellor has rebranded himself as a centrist darling – and a critic of Theresa May’s government. So, at last night’s Standard Progress 1000 awards at the Tate Modern, Osborne took great delight in telling the esteemed crowd – which included Diane Abbott, Matt Hancock and Grayson Perry – of how he had stood up to government bean counters when he first arrived in the Treasury: ‘In the first week of my former job, I was advised by the Treasury civil service to cancel immediately three projects because we had to save money and it was easier to save money

Damian Green gives Osborne the cold shoulder in Press Gallery speech

Oh dear. Although Theresa May is on a mission to unite her Cabinet after months of in-fighting, her mission appears not to extend to the party-at-large. Or if it does, that memo is yet to reach Damian Green. Today the First Secretary of State was guest speaker at the Press Gallery Lunch. Although Green is widely regarded as a safe pair of hands within government, there were a few lines that will ruffle feathers: Speaking about his predecessor – and former MP – George Osborne, Green said he normally takes ‘all his political insight’ from the London Evening Standard: ‘So I know that Theresa May is to blame for Ben

George Osborne: the politically homeless ex-chancellor

Did the 2007-08 financial crisis cause Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, the rise of Jeremy Corbyn? George Osborne’s answer, 10 years on from it all, echoed Zhou Enlai on the French revolution: it’s too early to say. But at a Spectator event at Cadogan Hall, in conversation with Andrew Neil, Osborne defended not only his policies as chancellor, but also – by implication, and rather unexpectedly – Gordon Brown’s. Looking back, he said, even if Britain wasn’t particularly well prepared for the collapse of Northern Rock and all that followed that autumn a decade ago, there was nothing ‘radically different’ that could have been done to respond to the

Steerpike

George Osborne: I’m just a journalist

Ten years on from the financial crash and Theresa May is Prime Minister, Jeremy Corbyn is leader of the opposition and George Osborne is editor of the Evening Standard. So, were the policies enacted by Osborne during his time in government partly to blame for this? Speaking to Andrew Neil at a Spectator event, Osborne suggested that this wasn’t the case, although he did admit that a historian looking back might see some link between the economic crash – and the response to it – and the rise of both Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn. The economic shock to the West has thrown up many political changes, suggested Osborne. ‘But

Diary – 21 September 2017

Next month, the Today programme marks its 60th anniversary, so I have been mugging up on the archives. If there is a lasting characteristic, I reckon it is curiosity about how the world works. After four months in this job, my sense of wonder is undimmed that global experts on everything from nuclear warheads to rare plants can be conjured on to the show. Political debate is at the heart of Today, but it is knowledge rather than opinion that I prize most, and even the most avid political interviewers have a hinterland. They also understand the cumulative effect of unsocial working hours. The great Sue MacGregor, who is chairing

George Osborne defrosts humble pie

Oh dear. It was a case of bad timing for George Osborne last week when the day after the paper he edits offered Theresa May an olive branch, a profile appeared in Esquire magazine claiming the former Chancellor had told hacks he would not rest until the Prime Minister was chopped up in bits in his freezer. Since then Osborne has been widely condemned by both Tory MPs and women’s action groups against violence. So, it was only a matter of time until an apology came. This apology appears to be lurking in a leader in today’s Evening Standard. Osborne appears to have had to eat humble pie – with the

George Osborne’s ice-cold revenge

Oh dear. Although George Osborne appeared to offer Theresa May an olive branch in Tuesday’s Evening Standard with a leader praising her work on modern slavery, there’s reason to believe all is not well. In an Esquire profile of the former chancellor, Ed Caesar lifts the lid on Osborne’s plans to use the paper to make life difficult for the Prime Minister. He claims that Osborne has said he will not rest until she ‘is chopped up in bags in my freezer’: ‘When I met him at the Standard this past spring, he was polite enough about the prime minister. But according to one staffer at the newspaper, Osborne has told