Inside George Osborne’s war room
‘Now we have got to have something to say’
The shadow chancellor maps out the Tory election campaign
It is interesting to hear Mr Osborne distance himself from the ‘über-modernisers’ who many believe went too far in the early Cameron years. What he calls rebalancing is what Labour gleefully refers to as a ‘lurch to the right’ — a characterisation he would strongly dispute. But there is more to come. Immigration, which has been regarded as the third rail by the Conservatives since the last general election, is slowing entering its campaigning vocabulary.
Mr Cameron last month said immigration had been ‘too high’, a rare intervention. He did not say much more, but Mr Osborne elaborates: ‘I don’t think we were ready for the impact on public services of a very large number of people coming to this country. Immigration from eastern Europe was 100 times, well maybe 50 times greater than the government predicted it was going to be. So there was a complete failure to anticipate the impact on our public services or indeed the impact on our economy.’
Immigration has been a ‘broad benefit’, he says. ‘But it has put an enormous pressure on some of our low-skilled British citizens who have found themselves in some parts of Britain priced out of the job market. I don’t think we have done enough as a country to give these people the right education or skills. It is no good Gordon Brown saying, “British jobs for British workers”, when he has singly failed to prepare British workers for the ten year he’s been chancellor.’
During those ten years, Mr Brown faced six shadow chancellors of whom Mr Osborne was the last. Yet he defied predictions that he’d be swallowed alive. So how does he feel about accusations that he is miscast and that the top two people in the party are both young? He dislikes this description. ‘People like William Hague, David Davis and Liam Fox are just as important as I am,’ he says. Nor does he feel he should be blamed for being in his job. ‘David Cameron decides who is shadow chancellor, not me.’
Initially it was Michael Howard who picked Mr Osborne to be shadow chancellor — on the condition, it is said, that he ran for the party leadership. Is Mr Osborne now glad he didn’t agree? ‘He suggested I think about running, he didn’t want me to be the leader as such,’ he says. ‘It didn’t take me long to work out it wasn’t for me. It was the right decision because David has transformed the fortunes of the party.’
A tieless Mr Cameron walks into the room halfway through the interview to say hello. ‘Ah, so that’s where all the booze is kept,’ he says, nodding to the bottles of Château Village 2003 in the corner of Mr Osborne’s office. There were half a dozen red, a dozen white — but no one had bought any champagne. This is reassuring. For all Mr Osborne’s optimism, he would be the first to admit that there is much more to be done before victory celebrations become a serious prospect. And this realism is one of the greatest assets that Mr Cameron now has.
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Matthew Quirk
September 28th, 2007 6:45pmDear Sir, So George Osborne admits that the public has no firm idea about what a Conservative government would do – or at least he fails to rebut the accusation. Two weeks ago I received a standard letter ostensibly sent by the local Conservative Association, but clearly approved by Central Office, asking me to say what issues are really important to me. It was a shining example of the barren thinking within the party. Every issue mentioned is indeed important, but every issue is a symptom not a cause. In the Speccy you have written a good piece upon the new political class. It is a commonplace that getting people to come out and vote is really difficult. People donīt want to vote because they see a political class that aims only to perpetuate itself, while muttering platitudes about symptoms, not causes. How can you seriously want to vote for people of any party who: a. ensure they have inflation-proofed pensions at the taxpayersī expense when others donīt b. allow the Inland Revenue to tax people retrospectively? c. allow our judiciary to be subordinated to a European Court, so that it can no longer be independent of the Executive, Parliament and the Monarch? d. maintain a fiction that the new self-amending European Treaty is different from the proposed Constitution? e. allow Scottish MPs to vote on English issues, without a reciprocal right for English MPs? f. allow such a complication of the tax laws that not even specialists understand them anymore – (and anyway, why make them so difficult in the first place so that a taxpayer needs a specialist?). g. exhort people to "take responsibility" when they create regulators and fragment organisations so that the lines of responsibility are completely unclear – DEFRA, NHS, FSA and the Bank of England are but a few examples. How laughable is it that there has to be a Regulator to deal with hospital cleanliness? h. pour billions into the public services with so little to show for it? i. allow laws to be made by instruments in Parliament rather than after detailed debate What are the root causes of the dissatisfaction engendered by each of these points? a. that citizens can no longer even be seen to be equal under the law b. that no citizen can plan his business or personal affairs within a clear framework of taxation c. that elected representatives donīt understand what it is they are legislating about d. that elected representatives cannot exercise any control over government organisations e. that incompetence is built not only into government but also into political parties f. that politicians have given up the fight and "gone native" People donīt want to hear about symptoms anymore – they want the root causes dealt with – in short to ensure that government is done properly and clearly, and that what it cannot do properly or clearly is handed out to someone else who can, and who is very clearly accountable for doing so. Thatīs what Iīm hearing on the doorsteps, and the party that gets to grips with that will get the votes.