Should Osborne start planning a second career in soft furnishings?

Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business

I’ve come up with a slogan to revive flagging Conservative canvassers — and an encouraging report from the doorsteps. My man in the housing estates of suburban York, of which I wrote two weeks ago, told me ‘the Labour vote is collapsing’ two days before reporters started using that phrase on Radio 4. He also said he was still meeting large numbers of ‘don’t knows’. So there’s everything to play for. But no one could say the Tory campaign has gone according to plan — and that fact is adding new venom to criticism of George Osborne, who is the campaign’s director as well as would-be chancellor. Wondering how much of the venom emanates from sources close to Lord Mandelson, I have been conducting my own canvass about Osborne in the financial world — and I’m sorry to say I haven’t found a single respondent in the past ten days who wholeheartedly endorses him. Almost all describe him as too inexperienced, too cocky, too eager to grab a headline. One senior City figure emailed, ‘A fast learner so will probably be OK,’ only to ring later with, ‘On second thoughts, he’s got to go.’ The most balanced assessment was, ‘Put a gun to the average trader’s or fund manager’s head and ask who they want as chancellor out of Osborne, Cable the moralising windbag or Darling the ditherer, and I suspect the answer would be Osborne.’

I also asked what they thought of his deputy, Philip Hammond, whom Westminster watchers see as a coming man. ‘Measured, cogent, knows his stuff, but not a leader,’ would be a fair summary, with a significant minority saying, ‘No idea, don’t even know what he looks like.’ As to whom they would really prefer as chancellor, the answer is the same as I suspect it would be from most of those flagging Tory canvassers: either Ken Clarke, if he’d do it, or William Hague.