
The trick Osborne missed
The politically mobile American entrepreneur is a species which has no real equivalent in British politics. We tend to separate the moneymakers from the policymakers at an early age. And that is what Steve Forbes, the publishing billionaire and former presidential candidate, thinks has gone wrong in Britain: our political class has lost its sense of enterprise, and has no ideas for economic recovery. We meet in Claridge’s hotel: he’s in London for a visit cut short by his attempt to avoid the worst strikes since the 1970s. To him, this is just the most visible sign that Britain is regaining the status it had when he was young: ‘the
