George Osborne, UK chancellor who grew up and became an idealist
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Political commentators live on a necessary conceit. We pretend that middle aged men — the people who, for the most part, run governments — are capable of change. We instruct leaders to be more like this and less like that, as if it were a matter of adjusting a dial in their souls. We treat a politician as a tabula rasa on which our clever ideas and strategic counsel can be inscribed.
All the while we know that character takes shape early in life and calcifies in adulthood. When someone refers to their “formative years”, they do not mean their forties. Exceptions are rare.
And so to George Osborne, the Conservative chancellor of the exchequer, the first secretary of state and the mutant of Westminster. At 44, he is scarcely recognisable as the politician he was at, say, 40. The diet and haircut that now allow him to pass for an ascetic medieval friar are actually the least of it.
His way of doing politics has changed too, from tactics to vision, from the particular to the principle. He was once “dangerously pragmatic” and the “ultimate cynic” — and that was according to his friends. Now he has, if not an ideology, then a preoccupation with his tangible legacy.
A few years ago, the quickest way of exasperating Mr Osborne was to recommend a brave, unpopular course of action. He resented idealism with the eye-rolling brusqueness of a man who had given his best years to a losing party. Now he is annoyed when colleagues fail to show imagination or a project gets clogged in the intestines of Whitehall. The government’s major works — fiscal consolidation, the divestment of money and power to cities, pension reform — are steered by him. He is restless at the margins too, squirrelling extra cash into free schools, joining the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, bringing the renminbi to London.
It is not clear where the votes are in this. One prominent Tory finds it increasingly hard to interest the chancellor in purely political conversations. The younger Osborne, with his reptilian brain and eye for the electoral bottom line, would blanch at what he has become. People are supposed to grow less idealistic with age.
Evident in his work — and his Mansion House speech last week — is a quest virtually to inoculate Britain against the left. He envisions a country that is, like him, of the liberal right, with a smaller, looser state, perpetual surpluses and a profiteering openness to the world, especially Asia. You need not admire this blueprint to recognise its centrality to everything the government does. And some who do admire it worry that it will test the Tories’ electoral mandate to breaking point. Voters gave them a decisive but cool endorsement last month against extravagantly useless opponents, not a licence to turn Britain into a more permissive Singapore.
Either way, Mr Osborne’s mutation is the story of this government. David Cameron has not changed since becoming prime minister five years ago. If their partnership were dramatised in film, the chancellor’s role would demand the better actor: he alone goes through a narrative arc.
On Wednesday, when he stands in for the prime minister at his weekly inquisition by parliament, MPs and observers will take his measure as a putative successor. If he does run for the Tory leadership one day (something people rather take for granted) we know almost exactly how he would govern. He has crystalline definition for someone who seemed endlessly negotiable on most matters not long ago.
His problem — or perhaps ours — is that his personal change is slow to register. Last week, Mr Osborne said he would legislate to require future governments to run a budget surplus in “normal times”. Criticism was swift and wide. Tellingly, everyone, including Tory enthusiasts for the idea, assumed his true motives were political; that the spectacle of Labour MPs voting against his bill would entrench their reputation for fiscal laxity.
The next election, however, is five years away. It may be that Mr Osborne is playing several thousand moves ahead on the chess board but we should entertain the idea that he actually believes in his cause. To some Treasury minds, unconventional measures are needed in a country where debt is 80 per cent of national output and the next recession might be nearer than the last. On spending, but also on devolution and globalisation, on public services and pensions, the chancellor wants to change the common sense of his age. It is a lofty goal and there is quotidian work to be getting on with. But he makes this government more interesting than it might have been, and proves that the commentator’s conceit can sometimes come true.
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