Osborne, class and competence

The Sunday Mirror and the Independent have jointly commissioned an opinion poll which finds that George Osborne is ‘too posh’ to be chancellor. This just happens to fit the prejudices of both newspapers, and I for one do not believe it. Poshness certainly obsesses Tory strategists, and Gordon Brown sometimes played the class card because he saw how much agony it caused them. But Brown’s card was not the winning trump he hoped for because the British public is not as obsessed about class as the British elite. That’s why it backfired when Labour tried a class strategy in the Crewe by-election campaign.

That by-election suggested that the average British person cares more about competence than class. This is Osborne’s present problem. His reputation has crashed since the Budget, which is still unraveling. Osborne is the only cabinet member who has no experience of work outside of politics, so isn’t as au fait with the dynamics of wealth creation as someone who has had to hire, fire and cope with regulation. This creates a deeper quandary, one identified by Peter Oborne in his book The Triumph of the Political Class. If you regard, say, inflation as just another indicator on a sheet of metrics then you are more relaxed about QE and the effect it has on living standards (falling at the fastest rate since records began in 1962, according to the IFS). It blinds you to the problems created by things like the pasty tax, and the charity tax. Few people really care that Osborne is heir to a baronetcy, but his haphazard approach to economic recovery is an issue.

Even Brown worked out that the class card would get him nowhere with voters, but he also knew that the issue tortured the Cameroons and that they were anxious about their own backgrounds. As he knew, the 50p tax would be agonizing for them: if they cut it, they’d be attacked as rich boys out for their own kind, and that is there Room 101 fear. This is why it caused so much furore. Before the Budget, I was told that – for these reasons – the Treasury was fretting so much about the 50p tax that they didn’t focus properly on the other problems. So class does matter, but not in the way that Osborne’s Labour enemies think.

PS: It’s a well-known polling trick to ask rude questions about ministers who are in the dog house. The answers are disobliging. You could have asked if Osborne was too southern, too black-haired, too mean, a teller of bad jokes – people would probably agree. So the ‘too posh’ verdict should be seen in that context. It’s also striking that, when asked if he should be replaced with Hague or someone similar, they said no. This, for Osborne, offers some comfort. He may be judged posh, but still not too posh to push.