Osborne enters the fray

Seems that the Tories can be more assertive too. After remaining more or less silent on the matter since the coalition was formed, George Osborne has today given his take on the AV referendum to the Daily Mail — and he’s far from kind towards the Yes campaign. “What really stinks,” says the Chancellor, “is actually one of the ways the Yes campaign is funded.” What he has in mind are the campaign’s ties to an organisation that sells vote counting services, as revealed by Ed Howker in The Spectator. “I think there are some very, very serious questions that have to be answered.”

But, rather than just attacking the Yes campaign itself, Osborne also has some choice barbs for the Lib Dem part of it. A No vote, he suggests, will close the question of electoral reform “for the foreseeable future” — which is another way of saying that it’s now or never, Nick Clegg. And, intriguingly, the Mail also reports that Osborne “attacked Nick Clegg for changing his mind on the merits of the AV system,” although it doesn’t give a quote. It’s no accident, you feel, that another Lib Dem — Charles Kennedy — has been chosen by the Yes campaign to strike back at Osborne. “It’s clear the Tories don’t believe they can win the debate on the facts alone and instead have taken to deceiving people,” is how he sees it.

It was always going to be thus: Lib Dems and Tories sniping at each other from opposite sides of the AV battlefield. But this latest interview still suggests just how bitter this battle could be, and how its various enmities might fester. We have seen a heightened level of activity over the past few days — with both campaigns releasing party political broadcasts; some eye-catching news on the opinion poll front; and, now, Osborne’s intervention. It’s almost as though the vote were only three weeks away. 

UPDATE: The Mail have now put an extended version of the interview online, and it includes Osborne’s jibe against Nick Clegg. Here’s the relevant passage, although it’s worth reading the full article:

“Mr Osborne said it was ‘quite difficult to find anyone that’s really in favour of AV’ — and pointed out that Mr Clegg used to condemn it. ‘Ben Bradshaw, who’s running the Labour yes campaign, previously derided it, and my good colleague Nick Clegg called it a “miserable little compromise”,’ the Chancellor said. ‘There are some people who want proportional representation and they are using AV as a Trojan horse. ‘But if some of the most prominent people who were saying you should vote for AV have previously said it’s a miserable little compromise or attacked it…. then I think people should pay heed. They should pay careful attention to what people said before there was an AV referendum in the offing.'”