Oborne: Cameron Will Eventually Have To Sack Osborne

My old chum and occasional cricket skipper Peter Oborne is at it again. Causing mischief, that is. Peter – who once compared David Cameron to Disraeli and still, I think, has great hopes for the Prime Minister – thinks the time will soon come for Cameron to sack his Chancellor. That’s not quite what he says but it is the logical implication of a column in which he complains that George Osborne is not much more than a part-time Chancellor of the Exchequer:

Cameron is addicted to Osborne, in rather the same way that Tony Blair was addicted to Peter Mandelson, and for the same reasons. He feels that he cannot do without Osborne’s ingenious political brain.

This, while understandable, does raise other very serious issues. The Chancellor is devoting perhaps half his time to sorting out problems which have nothing to do with the national finances.

[…] Treasury officials worry that they can’t get face time with their boss. Many people will find it very shocking that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, faced with economic calamity, is not working flat out on his job.

But this daily diversion of precious time and energy is not the only problem. Even more disturbing is the conflict of interest. Chancellors of the Exchequer should have one over-riding purpose: the safeguarding of the national finances. But Osborne also gives high-level political counsel to the Prime Minister. He cannot perform both of these roles with integrity because they are completely contradictory. Put simply, prime ministers like to spend, while it is the job of chancellors to save. Indeed, it is this constitutional duty to keep the national finances intact which explains why the greatest chancellors have always enjoyed edgy and uncomfortable relationships with Downing Street.

[…] It is easy to understand why Osborne and Cameron should have wanted to enjoy such a close relationship. During their nearly five years in opposition, they had in front of them the example of Blair and Brown, who hated each other so much that government became paralysed.

Yet in order to head off that danger, they have created another difficulty. They have become much too close. They have got away with it up to now, but as time passes – and especially as the election approaches – this proximity will become intolerable. David Cameron urgently needs to decide whether he needs his friend Osborne as chancellor or as political strategist. He can no longer be both.

Many – perhaps all? –  Prime Ministers end up hating their Chancellors but the job is not, perhaps, as cleanly divided between purse-watching and political manoeuvering as Peter suggests. Nor is the Blair-Brown relationship the only warning light; Margaret Thatcher’s position began to unravel when her relationship with Nigel Lawson became poisonous.

Moreover, in the present climate (and with a coalition government to manage too) I’m not as persuaded as Peter seems to be that you can pretend that the Treasury is some idealised, even idyllic, haven for cool-headed, disinterested technocrats single-mindedly focused on The National Interest. (That’s what the OBR is for and why it was set up. Also, of course, to provide political cover for fiscal decisions.)

In theory, Osborne’s Treasury role might be thought his most important job; in practice if Cameron really were forced to choose he might opt for George the Political Brain and Strategist. But in reality they are not so easily split apart. Much of politics is spending these days and all spending is politics. The same might be said of every decision not to spend.

Peter, as always, makes his case in typically bravura style but, at present and for the foreseeable future, the Prime Minister will decline to follow his advice for the obvious and, from Cameron’s perspective, pretty compelling reason that doing so would cause the government enormous political problems and, perhaps, no small measure of economic difficulty either.