They booed George Osborne at the 2012 Paralympics, and what a joy it was to hear that great national raspberry ricochet round the stadium. Back then, the public couldn’t know how much damage this pernicious chancellor would inflict or how long his blight would stretch ahead.
And yet, and yet, just possibly, almost inconceivably, he may rally round him the only effective resistance to the coming catastrophe of Theresa May’s article 50 plans. Day by day, Brexit is turning the world upside down in ways unimaginable a year ago. A war – and Brexit is a civil war – creates the strangest bedfellows. Think Churchill embracing Stalin, Movietone News hymning praises to Uncle Joe, our mass-murdering ally – just for the duration. Normal hostilities resumed afterwards.
So it may be with Osborne. Nothing will be forgotten or forgiven but, just for the duration, hold back the vitriol if he can indeed stiffen the backbone of the majority of remain Tory MPs to take back control from the Brexit extremists and their bully press. Facing down those wreckers needs this schemer, yet more Machiavellian than they are.
That’s what he seems to have been hired to do as editor of the London Evening Standard – his new owner, Evgeny Lebedev, proclaims: “He will provide more effective opposition to the government than the current Labour party,” (an abysmally low threshold). Osborne says: “I am going to continue to play a big role in public life,” as he smirks threateningly across at Theresa May. Is this pure revenge and opportunism? But if he means to use the Standard as an antidote to killer Brexit, then urge him on: go for it, George!
Lest we forget, nothing will be forgiven. Let me count the ways he has infected British politics with mean-minded malice, kicking the weak, and leaving in his wake a trail of 500 food banks feeding over a million people made destitute by his policies. As he trousers squalidly greedy rewards for failure, his plan to dwindle the state away continues apace, shredding public services, crippling local authorities, stripping the public realm bare. Wherever you look, things are falling apart. The £3bn skinned from schools, the overflowing NHS, the fewest houses built in living memory, social care collapsing, children’s centres closed, prisons at riot point – wherever you look, his pigeons are staggering home to roost. His genius was in persuading enough voters that all this was essential due to Labour profligacy, a calumny branded into Labour’s hide.
Benefits took the brunt. How cleverly he corroded public faith in all benefit recipients, from newborn babies to the terminally ill in wheelchairs, treating them all as frauds and scroungers. His last budget took £12bn from the pockets of the bottom half, with some cuts sheer populism, such as the two-child limit, the benefit cap mendaciously suggesting £26,000 was the standard benefit level, or the welfare cap that limits the total sum paid out to a family, regardless of how many are in need.
He mainlined poison into the veins of the body politic, removing the last traces of trust in the 1945 welfare state. Only triple-locked pensioners were bribed to flock to vote Tory in gratitude. Behind him he left death traps for his successor – the extravagant raising of personal tax allowances benefiting mainly the upper half, and his deadly manifesto pledge of no tax rises, ever.
Remember his oft-repeated smear about the hard worker leaving home in the dark only to see his benefit-dependent neighbours’ blinds down? Remember his shocking use of deaths of the six Philpott children – who died in a house fire started by their parents – to query taxpayers “subsidising lifestyles like that”.
Economically illiterate, his tourniquet on spending held down growth and ensured the slowest ever “recovery” from any recession, with incomes still not restored. Revenues falling below forecasts caused yet more spending cuts, like a doctor using leeches to bleed a patient dry. His “balanced budget” slid from his promised five years to nowhere in sight. At least he has proved Keynes right, again: never cut into a depression. But hey, incompetence is no bar to £650,000 worth of advice to BlackRock – a job he should drop at once if he hopes to regain a shred of political credibility.
If Osborne now steps forward as national protector against a savage Brexit, he should apologise for all he did to cause that Brexit vote: tumbling living standards and public squalor fostered that sense of abandonment by the “metropolitan elite”. In speech after speech, he sprinkled populist anti-EU abuse: warning of “the constant drip, drip, drip of powers to Europe” earned him Tory party conference applause.
When Tony Blair on the Andrew Marr Show welcomed Osborne taking over the Standard, saying “He’s a highly capable guy and it should make politics more interesting,” he was right to acknowledge the man’s evil genius. He’s a political paladin and a master tactician anyone would want on their side. Too late now to regret all the previous political leaders of all parties who never tried to win hearts and minds or public understanding of the EU. But we are where we are – in a very bad place. Whatever and whoever it takes, pulling the country back from a Brexit disaster is the great national struggle.
A lot of hypocritical cant has been talked about Osborne’s double role as politician and editor. Britain’s press has been forever corrupted by mainly Tory owners using newspapers to promote their party interests. Only the Guardian and the FT are free to plough their own furrows, their views their own and not their proprietors’. Otherwise, the sanctimonious stuff about “independent” journalism should be read with a salt-laden cup of Galaxy Ultimate Marshmallow Hot Chocolate. Journalists posture as a priesthood of truth and beauty, but hear them resist the promised part two of the Leveson inquiry into the press, or the most basic independent regulation that would apply to any other trade (no, we are not a profession). Osborne can try his hand along with the rest of us unqualified, unregulated practitioners if some owner seeking social cachet wants to hire him.
If Osborne can turn the Evening Standard into a truth-telling instrument to strengthen the weak battalion of pro-Europeans, then we should cheer on whatever blows he can land against Brexiteer misinformation. But only for the duration, after which normal politics resumes, with a vengeance.
