Conservative Party conference 2014 sketch: George Osborne goes Trainspotting

At the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham, the Chancellor of the Exchequer gives a speech that draws inspiration from an unexpected source...

George Osborne gives his speech at the Conservative Party Conference
George Osborne gives his speech at the Conservative Party Conference

It isn't every year that a Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer gives a speech at party conference that ends with a cheerful homage to a graphically disturbing film about Edinburgh heroin addicts. But that, improbably yet inescapably, is what happened today.

Here's the big finale to George Osborne's speech. "Choose jobs. Choose enterprise. Choose security. Choose prosperity, investment, fairness, freedom. Choose David Cameron, choose the Conservatives, choose the future!"

And here's by far the most famous passage from Trainspotting, the vastly successful 1996 film adapted from Irvine Welsh's novel about junkies.

"Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a f------ big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers... Choose fixed-interest mortgage payments. Choose a starter home... Choose rotting away at the end of it all, p------ your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, f----- up brats you've spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life..."

When Trainspotting came out - swiftly becoming the most talked-about cultural event of that year - Mr Osborne was 24. He was also - at least by the standards of future Conservative Chancellors - trendy and metropolitan. There is no way he didn't see that film. And there is no way, when he was writing the finale of yesterday's speech, that he didn't have that quote in mind. This was no coincidence. This was a tribute.

Which, when you think about it, means something quite weird. The passage from Trainspotting, after all, is a blisteringly satirical parody of Thatcherite materialism. Mr Osborne's speech, therefore, was a parody of a parody - yet his parody of that parody was completely in earnest.

He explicitly and sincerely was celebrating f------ big televisions, electrical tin openers, fixed-interest mortgage payments, starter homes, and, though he expressed it in somewhat gentler terms, rotting away at the end of it all (albeit with the comfort of knowing that when you peg it the selfish etc brats you've spawned will get their hands on your money tax-free, because he's just abolished the tax on inherited pensions).

Remarkable. Satire, de-satirised.

Still, at least he didn't endorse the intravenous injection of class A drugs. Or maybe he's saving that for the manifesto. ("A Conservative government will deliver a much-needed boost to Britain's vital heroin-dealing industry, and the thousands of ambitious young entrepreneurs it employs. We want to see our growth figures shooting up - and our young people shooting up, too!")

Anyway. The speech as a whole seemed to go down pretty well, in particular the gag about Ed Miliband accidentally omitting the deficit from his own conference address: "His speech was so forgettable, he forgot it himself!"

Mainly, though, I marvelled at Mr Osborne's figure. How skinny he's become. It's almost eerie. He looks like an index finger in a tie.

Choose grapefruit. Choose the 5:2 diet. Choose frantically scanning for the calorie count on a packet of pumpkin-seed Ryvita...