Tuesday 29 August 2017

George Osborne: a Rhetorical Question

I was amused to see this piece, with its plaintive headline: 
Why is George Osborne always supporting the EU against Britain?
Come on, we know the answer to this!  He is an unutterable four-letter man, and a shameless one to boot.  He is firmly of the view that at some point in his future the serried ranks of the Conservative Party will dispatch a delegation to his door who, upon bended knee, will beg him to become their leader and PM.

I hope to live long enough to see him realise this ain't gonna happen.  If the Party still exists in any shape to command a Parliamentary majority, it will be because Someone Else has successfully taken charge, at which point No-one Else Need Apply.

Trouble is, Osborne's quite a bit younger than me and he'll probably go to his own grave still awaiting that knock on the door.

ND

17 comments:

Electro-Kevin said...

Power for its own sake is his mistake.

Raedwald said...

I see he's shed the Roman Senator look and reverted to that of the Furtive Onanist. I do hope staff at the ES are careful what they touch.

andrew said...

Column would imply some sort of solid support.
I don't see that.

More like one of the 5th

-Form (fits in with Raedwald)
-Amendment (wasn't me I wasn't there and I take the 5th - oh this isn't the USA)
-musketeer (the useless one they don't talk about much)

dustybloke said...

Liz MK I would have made a large incision on the back of his neck for his lies uttered to cow the ordinary folk.

One wonders why anyone would read a rag that:-

Now only exists as a platform for the editor to wreak daily revenge on a politician who sacked him for being incompetent

Is edited by someone who will remorselessly alter the facts of any story to enable him to wreak revenge etc. The story about Junker is mostly lies.

Elby the Beserk said...

An absolute shit, as my old man would have said. I will note also that the old man was an astute political commentator, noting to me in the '60s that the two greatest perils facing the world were the Yellow Peril (the Chinese, for younger readers) and Anthony Wedgewood-Benn. Bloody right, dad. Still miss him 30 years on since he died.

Charlie said...

The "master tactician" was useless at real politics. Decided to pretend he was significantly reigning in spending when he wasn't, which has allowed the left to chant "AUSTERITY!" until this day. Needlessly re-inflated a cooling housing market leading to the bubble-on-a-bubble we have today, all but baking in the demise of the party by depriving future generations of assets.

One of those arrogant little sh*ts who has never and will never come to realise that others around him are more capable and that he's not actually always right. Plenty of them outside politics too...

Bill Quango MP said...

Osborne was the highest ranked member of Dave's inner circle to say there should be no referendum.
He was of the opinion that despite opinion polls suggesting it would be won, too many variables existed.

He was so strident that eventually Cameron had to tell him to pack it in, as the decision had been made. To eliminate the UKIP threat. And now his job was to ensure a win for remain.

Nick Drew said...

So ! - all agreed then.

Except Mr BQ, that is (who has evidently been to one of those lavish parties Osborne gives for members of the 1922 Committee ...)

James Higham said...

Was going to try to add to that but realized I couldn't.

Anonymous said...

The question remains why does our political system allow such people high office. Where is the culling mechanism that prevents this?

Nick Drew said...

Anon - there have always been chancers in politics, no?
including at or close to the top (from the previous generation Jack Straw comes to mind)

but to account specifically for Osborne's success (and other lightweighs of the present era), I'd be thinking along these lines:

- at some point 20 years ago or so, the (elected) Left gave up on the serious idelogical fight, and a rather mish-mash version of what people call Neo-liberalism took root as the common assumption across all main parties (the thinking-left decries this phenomenon all the time)
- so no-one on the Right needed to try very hard in the field of political philosophy; and Serious People didn't gravitate towards politics anymore
- after a while & absent anyone else, rank student-politicians like Osborne gain currency as the Real Thing, just as third-rate psycho-babble like 'Nudge' gains currency as Serious Socio-Political Thinking (see CU's earlier post)

And then along come Corbyn / McDonnell / Momentum, and they burst through the doors of their dank cells as though made of damp tissue-paper

Heaven help us all!

Sebastian Weetabix said...

I don't think the left gave up the fight. They figured thanks to the stranglehold the left has on EU bureaucracy they had won. Why bother fighting open elections when you can be a "policy entrepreneur" in Brussels and dictate the directives? That has given us our insane environment, energy & asylum policies with no serious discussion and no open votes. And soon when we leave all that goes up in smoke. No wonder they're hopping mad.

On the other hand I fully expect that bumbling imbecile May to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. I wouldn't be surprised if we ended up outside the single market continuing to pay full whack with no customs agreement in place. This is what happens when a dim geography graduate without an original thought ever crossing the placid shallow pool of her brain accidentally becomes PM.

Bill Quango MP said...

I'm not a fan of the former chancellor.
He had his moments. The most memorable was also the earliest. His budget that effectively ended Gordon brown's premiership only months after it had begun. Brown never recovered from that table turning on inheritance tax on Brown's own chosen field of battle. The budget.

Sadly, this success led George to try and repeat it. And it was a very old trick of Brown's already. And he wasn't that good at it. So often his budgets were disasters.

However, he had lined himself up to be the next PM. Again, in a very Brownian fashion. Appointed by the leader. Wiping out opposition before the race begins.
promising future good times and current steady as she goes.

Thinking about it, he has quite a lot in common with Brown. Except the PM bit.

I doubt Osborne would have been a worse PM than Brown. But he might not have been much better either.

Nick Drew said...

footnote to 4:25 pm above - by some complete fluke, John Harris in the Graun posted this @ 19:15 (same day)

"Forty years of what some people call neoliberalism have long since scaled down most people’s expectations of what government can achieve; for most people, politics has tended to resemble a distant game, replete with both irrelevance and tedium, which leaves 99% of lives untouched"

spooky, eh?

formertory said...

I suspect Osborne is just gently eyeing the EU, greasing a few cogs and gears here and there, and waiting for the invitation to some top-flight, vastly well remunerated and expensed, sinecure with the Commission. An "adviser", perhaps. A "consultant". All padding out the CV for the day when he sees himself walking into Number 10.

Die Leute sind in ihrer Stunde der Not ...

Charles said...

The spiritual offspring of Heseltine. Osbourne among other things funded his austerity by further damaging the pension system, he is a worthy follower of Gordon Brown. It is very difficult to write rationally about people like this. As my American friends would say, "lower than a snake's belly in a swamp"

CityUnslicker said...

He is really miffed he EU sinecure as head of NATO or some such has been taken away. That is all, spoilt child syndrome.