George Osborne: The Austerity Chancellor

Let’s face it: Conservative Party Conference centred on one thing: Boris vs. Dave. Whilst the Prime Minister celebrated his birthday with a curry and, um, this, Boris celebrated being Boris Johnson to adoring crowds, with delegates, journalists and politicians alike doing their best to get a slice of him. But what of the other key figures in the government? Where were they at one of the most important events in their party’s calendar?

Here we enter the world of George Osborne. Rarely have voters known so little about a politician who wields such influence over their lives and livelihoods. There is no more controversial figure in British politics. He has produced the most unpopular Budget of recent times and made enemies on his own side as well as on the left. Yet his story has never been told. Until now.

The Daily Mail have been running extracts from Janan Ganesh’s George Osborne: The Austerity Chancellor this week, and they have revealed a previously unseen side to the Chancellor. Here are some of my favourite bits:

It was in his gap year that he was able to come out of his shell. He went on a trip to the Sahara with some friends where, arriving at one town, he introduced himself and his gang as members of the England under-21 football team.But the ruse — which he had thought might secure them new levels of enthusiastic hospitality — quickly got out of hand. A match was arranged between the travellers and the locals, who were bemused to find that Osborne could not kick a ball. His outfit should have been the clue: English footballers tend to avoid wide-brimmed hats and Barbour jackets.
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Osborne showed little patience towards tremulous colleagues faced with the realities. ‘This is what austerity looks like,’ he said, with flat realism. ‘What did you think was going to happen?’ But that didn’t stop the whingeing. The then Defence Secretary Liam Fox did not disguise his alarm at the Government’s review of defence spending. However, much the hardest Cabinet member to reach agreement with was Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith, whose vision of welfare reform aimed to improve incentives to work whatever the cost. If that meant spending more rather than less money, then so be it. That put him on a collision course with the Chancellor. Many in the Treasury still regard welfare reform as the ‘unexploded bomb’ underneath the Government.
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If Yachtgate was Osborne’s trickiest time, the biggest long-term problem he ever created for himself was Andy Coulson. The decision to employ him (in 2007, when in Opposition) and then to take him into Downing Street was the most controversial taken by the party during Cameron’s leadership. His hiring as the Tories’ media man would come to be seen as perhaps his and Osborne’s single greatest misjudgment. The reverberations would last years. They are not over yet, by a long chalk.

George Osborne: The Austerity Chancellor is the story of his extraordinary ascent to power: a journey driven by luck, guile, resilience, risk-taking and searing ambition. This is the chronicle of a time as well as a man. Osborne has had a starring role or front-row seat at all the Tory dramas since the fall of Thatcher. As a back-room adviser, an opposition MP and a Cabinet member, he has lived through the dog days of the Major government, the party’s long years in opposition, its eventual resurrection and now the glories and burdens of office. Here is the inside story of George Osborne and the political era he has helped to shape. Pre-order your copy now.