George Osborne must be cursing the day he chose Corfu as his holiday destination last summer. Everything was great for the shadow chancellor before that, but then he got himself entangled in a very silly but also very damaging political situation.
The Osborne-Deripaska affair became the first nail in the coffin. Boy George thought he could play hardball with heavyweight Peter Mandelson and came off hurting the new Tory brand. I wrote about this a month or so ago here.
That amateurish mistake is now spreading to his actual shadow cabinet portfolio, the economy. Firstly, his idea of tax credits to employers, announced by Cameron this week, has proven a total failure, both in terms of its economic rationale- it doesn’t achieve its aim and costs a lot more than the Tories say it does, read about it here- and the little impact it has had on back-footing Brown on the economy.
A Tory peer, Lord Kams, and an unnamed Tory MP have already called for Osborne’s replacement. The tax-cutting wing of the party is already uneasy about his lack of vision and pundits are starting to read the runes about possible hints in Cameron’s behaviour that might signal an early exit for his economic wonderboy. In the meantime Osborne is doing no good to the UK economy with his alarmism while Brown and Darling are meeting world leaders in Washington trying to sort out the world economy.
Agree. Incredibly muddled over Northern Rock, and then credit crunch more generally as it rolled on. And Hopi et al. are spot on about the national insurance stuff. Deripaska affair stunk, and just confirmed in lots of people’s mind that he is the out of touch toff that he comes across as (in a way that DC doesn’t). I think Mandelson must be all over this stuff, for example in the perfect Labour spinning against Osbourne’s “irresponsible” comments on the pound.
In many senses I think Osbourne is to the Tories what Prezza became to us, a bit of a charicature very much representing where the party had come from, not where it was going to (GO is as much of a toff as JP is Northern workingman’s club type). This totally limited JP’s abiltiy to gain any traction with the public on policy, for this reason I think we should keep peppering GO and make it uncomfortable for him but not try and get him out. To have a discredited individual in THE key opposition job at the moment is ideal, lets keep him there.
I would say that while Prescott was the link between old and new Labour and kept the ‘winning coalition’ talking to each other, re. the unions and Blair et al, this is not the case with Osborne who doesn’t bring in the old Tories, the tax-cut social conservatives of the Tebbit wing, for the Cameronites. Therefore I would say Prescott was much more useful to Blair than Osborne is to Cameron.
I agree. So the same downside as we had with Prescott without the benefits you refer to (which probably made JP a net asset to the party).