So how did George Osborne the failure become the people’s favourite?
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Version 0 of 1. George Bernard Shaw once remarked – it was one of his better jokes – that “my reputation grows with every failure”. The same could be said of another George. In the estimation of his fans, he’s the Tory grandmaster of strategy, the man who is always four moves ahead of his opponents. I’ve never really understood how George Osborne, more of a dice-throwing politician than a chess-playing one, managed to acquire this image. Consider the strategic goals he has set himself over the past five years. He has missed each one of them. He ran the last Tory campaign. That was the election the Tories had to win against an opponent as unpopular as Gordon Brown. Yet they failed to secure a majority. When he set out as chancellor, he defined as his paramount task the elimination of the structural deficit by 2014-15. The idea being that the coalition’s last year could be spent congratulating themselves on a job done and lubricating the voters with feel-good giveaways. Yet as this parliament gasps its last, deficit-reduction is only half done, promising further spending cuts after the election to a country already very weary of austerity. Back in 2010, he told us recovery would be powered by an export drive and a surge in productivity. Recovery has come, but it is mainly fuelled by his artificial stimulants to the housing market, consumer spending and household debt. It was to him that the Tory party looked to align the economic cycle with the political one. By this stage, prosperity was supposed to be tiding the Conservatives to the clear victory that eluded them last time. I am told by Conservative MPs that Lynton Crosby, the prime minister’s Australian strategist, keeps revising backwards his estimation of the date when the Tories will pull decisively ahead of Labour. If the so-called “cross over” finally turns up on 8 May, it is going to be too late for them. The best explanation for their failure to translate their advantage on the economy into a polling breakthrough is the continuing toxicity of the Tory brand, the distrust of their values and motives among many voters, their reputation as the “nasty party”. Since Mr Osborne was a key architect of Tory modernisation that is another failure for which he must share blame with David Cameron. Some Tory MPs are now muttering that the chancellor has let them down again in the budget. This was their last big opportunity to change the political weather. They were yearning for a game-changer that would break the deadlock in the polls. What they got were some low-cal sweeteners scattered at selected segments of the electorate and cash bungs thrown at marginal constituencies. His hat had no killer rabbit. There wasn’t a theatrical coup to dazzle the electorate and banjax the opposition. Labour was mightily relieved. “We were expecting harder punches,” admits one Labour frontbencher. Ed Miliband’s outrage that the budget had nothing to say about the NHS was not entirely synthetic. Labour is genuinely surprised that the chancellor did not try to cover that vulnerable Tory flank. One Labour strategist says: “He hasn’t taken the NHS off the ballot paper.” The lack of surprises was partly because, as I reported last week, the Lib Dems wouldn’t let him do a vote-mugging crowd-pleaser. It was also because the state of the national finances and the public’s justifiable scepticism about pre-election gimmicks militated against any lavish giveaways. What cash he had in hand was mainly spent trying to correct the political blunder he made in his autumn statement just three months ago when he trailed future spending cuts so severe that he exposed himself to Labour’s charge that the Tories would take Britain “back to the 1930s”. In trying to blunt that attack on him as a state-shrinking zealot, he ended up presenting a very strange trajectory for public spending after the election. Savage cuts early on would be followed by a surge back upwards towards the end of the next parliament. The Office for Budget Responsibility, the watchdog he created, calls this “a rollercoaster”. The Lib Dems signed off on it, but they privately describe it as “bizarre” and “absurd”. No one thinks the next government will follow the plans for public spending laid out in the budget. Not even if Mr Osborne is chancellor again. As a result, the post-budget debate has revolved not around the goodies promised to voters but the spending cuts to come. That’s not what the Conservatives wanted. Tory MPs will be anxiously scanning this weekend’s opinion polls for evidence that they’ve got some sort of bounce out of the budget. Our Opinium poll today does have the Tories moving into a narrow lead, but I recite my usual health warning not to read too much into small twitches in the polls. Unless they have been totally botched-up, budgets usually produce a bit of poll lift for the government. The Tories need to be about 5% ahead of Labour, and consistently so, before they can start feeling confident that they will be the largest party in the next parliament. The revelation that David Cameron’s loyalists are already organising to try to protect him from a post-election coup by his enemies within tells us a lot about how confident Number 10 really feels about winning the election. This is not where the prime minister and his chancellor once hoped and expected to be this close to the moment of truth. So his sixth and final budget of this parliament – and the last budget of his career if the Tories are kicked out – rather sums up George Osborne’s chancellorship. A lot of political artifice. A lot of trying to make the best of a bad hand. A lot of goalpost moving. A lot of time spent attempting to correct past mistakes. And delivered from an overall position that was not where he originally intended to be. And yet. And yet. His personal reputation with the public is really pretty good. This is probably going to surprise you, but George Osborne has become a popular politician. The man who was booed at the Paralympics after his terrible omnishambles budget of 2012 now enjoys very decent ratings. Our poll finds that 43% think he has been “a good chancellor” against 24% who reckon the opposite. So more people – considerably more – rate him as chancellor than currently say they intend to vote Tory. Overall, he has a net approval rating of +19. That compares very favourably with most other politicians, including his next-door neighbour. David Cameron has a net approval rating of -1. Ed Miliband is on -24. Nick Clegg – cue the violins – is on -39. The popular George Osborne? I appreciate that quite a lot of readers are going to find it hard to get their heads round that idea, but there it is in the numbers. I think this can be broadly explained by three factors. One of the things this most political of politicians did get right was control of the narrative. Early in this parliament, he defined the problem as the deficit and the cause as the profligacy of the last Labour government. The Eds, Balls and Miliband, try as they might to point out that the crash had something to do with it, have never managed to defeat that argument. To this day, more people blame austerity on the last Labour government than hold the chancellor responsible. Added to which, he has been a lot more flexible than either he or his opponents like to acknowledge. When growth went sickly in 2010 and then stagnated for much of 2011 and 2012, one government figure recalls: “Osborne was shitting himself.” He slowed the pace of fiscal consolidation and redefined it as a two-term task. A few of us spotted this at the time, but it was not widely appreciated. Labour did not want to acknowledge that he had gone a bit Keynesian because that ran counter to their story that the Tories are just evil axemen. He did not want to acknowledge that he had adjusted course because he did not want to admit to a U-turn. So much for the “long-term economic plan”. In truth, he’s been more the make-it-up-as-you-go-along chancellor. The third part of my explanation for his popularity is the state of the economy. When voters appraise the performance of the occupant of Number 11, they are not making a judgment on whether they like his personality or the cut of his suits. This chancellor is not a character whom the public instinctively warm to – and he has enough self-awareness to know it. During the last election, a colleague asked him whose pictures would be displayed on Tory billboard posters. “Well,” replied Mr Osborne, “it won’t be mine.” His approval rating is centrally a reflection of how people are feeling about the economy. Opinium finds that 37% of voters think the economy is now in a “good state” against 28% who think it is in a “bad state”. I hear an increasing volume of complaint from jittery Tories that their monochromatic, monotonous campaign is staking too much on the economy as the decider of this election. Look at the chancellor’s approval rating. That tells you why he and David Cameron are staking all their chips on it. |