Filming Bono, fighting Balls – how George Osborne’s preparing for his autumn statement

James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman discuss George Osborne’s 2013 Autumn statement:

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Next week’s autumn statement looks at first as if it should be easy for George Osborne. For the first time, he’ll arrive with unambiguously good news. He can announce an upgrade of the growth forecasts and that borrowing has come in lower than expected. Politically, however, his task is as difficult as ever. He has to wrestle back the initiative from Labour.

Preparations for this ‘fiscal event’, to use the Whitehall parlance, have been intense. The government’s top Tories met last Friday to discuss how they wanted to project both David Cameron’s trip to China, which they hope will dominate the headlines in the days beforehand, and the autumn statement. They are acutely aware that this is their best chance to halt the momentum that Ed Miliband has had since his pledge to freeze energy prices.

Lessons have been learnt from the spectacular unravelling of the budget last year. Osborne will stay at home while Cameron goes to China. His presence alongside the Prime Minister in Washington last year was one of the many reasons that the 2012 budget turned into such a disaster. Indeed, the bar on travel to China extends even to those ministerial allies whose help Osborne might have to call on.

Osborne is a more mature politician than he was then. He has strengthened the ministers and advisers around him and improved his media performances, his weakest suit. But he still has a weakness for the trappings of power. He couldn’t resist an invitation to the PR guru Matthew Freud’s 50th birthday party, for instance. Once there, he pulled out his phone to record a duet between Bono and Bob Geldof — an act of gaucheness that has been the subject of much mockery in the Cameron circle.