Yesterday George Osborne found himself accused of using spin to distract attention from his missed financial targets — with the introduction of the sugar tax. Matters weren’t helped when the Chancellor’s former chief of staff Rupert Harrison appeared to admit — in a BBC interview — that the tax was introduced in the hope that it would distract from other potentially more negative Budget headlines.
So, how deep does Osborne’s spin operation go? Mr S only asks after spying a curious change of phrase in today’s Times. At 5.23pm yesterday, a comment piece by Philip Aldrick — the paper’s economic editor — was previewed online. It ran with the headline ‘Comment: the budget of a desperate chancellor‘. And the intro:
‘George Osborne pitched his eighth budget as putting “the next generation first”. A budget “to make Britain fit for the future”. What it was, rather, was the budget of a desperate chancellor.’
The piece then ran in the paper’s first print edition, under a new print headline ‘Time to think outside the box, George’ — with the description of Osborne as ‘desperate’ remaining in the first paragraph:
However, in the later print editions of the paper, the word ‘desperate’ has been removed and replaced by a much more sympathetic description. Here Aldrick declares that this was the ‘budget of a nervous chancellor’:
So, did staff at the Times also suffer from nerves? With the piece previewed online early evening, there would have been enough time for Osborne’s PR team to express their dismay at the negative description before the second edition was sent to the printers…
Of course, if it were the case that Osborne’s team had asked for the phrasing to be changed, that really could be described as the behaviour of a ‘desperate’ chancellor.
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