Here’s a story about George Osborne that you might find instructive. About five years ago, I was emailed by a minion at Bell Pottinger, a public relations racket named after and run by Tim Bell, Margaret Thatcher’s favourite advertising man. They were proposing to organise an exhibition of my work at the Westminster Bookshop, similar to one that Denis MacShane got together in 1998 and which was opened by Peter Mandelson. Better yet, they even had someone lined up grandly to open this one, in the form of George Osborne MP.
I replied to the email in the following terms. First, I wasn’t quite sure who George Osborne was, apart from being a character in Thackery’s Vanity Fair. Second, I wasn’t in the business of providing the fig leaf of having a sense of humour to ambitious young Tory politicians. That said, however, I would go along with their little plan, as long as I could sell my work, invite my mates and make a speech.
They instantly agreed to all my conditions and so, about a month later, the big night arrived. My work was propped up on shelves around the bookshop, my mates duly arrived and commenced on the serious exercise of hoovering up as much of Lord Bell’s free booze as possible and then George arrived, trailing behind Tim Bell. They both had a little look round, then George and I mounted the steps up to the mezzanine level and George made a speech. Cartoons, he said, were absolutely splendid things, these were all jolly good, and, although he didn’t see any of himself round the walls, doubtless I would draw him in time. He concluded with some bland pronouncement I no longer remember and it was my turn to speak.
I started off by saying that the reason I hadn’t done any cartoons of him was that, until this evening, I had no idea what he looked like and, until a few weeks previously, I’d never heard of him. This, I continued, was because of the abject hopelessness of the Conservative opposition, who through arrogance and self-indulgence had left the real job of opposition to the cartoonists such as myself and Steve Bell, who was also enjoying his ennobled namesake’s largesse.
However, I went on, should the dark day ever arrive when he, George, managed to climb to the top of the greasy pole (he gave an enthusiastic bark at this point), then it was only fair to warn him that every day of his life, my colleagues and I would be emphasising his weak chin, that weird cleft in his nose, his bad skin and everything else about his appearance, while also depicting him eating babies while wading thigh-high through a vast lake of human blood and shit. And I finished off by telling him that if he didn’t fancy a future of crying himself to sleep every night, he still had time to retire from public life and get into interior decoration or run a pet shop or something.
It was at this point, with his lower lip trembling slightly, that the future Chancellor of the Exchequer suddenly burst out: “I wasn’t expecting this kind of thing!”
In truth, I now felt slightly sorry for him. I’d been ungracious and mean, and my mates were still hoovering up Lord Bell’s booze. So, as Bell was leaving, I expressed my thanks and apologised for being a bit hard on Osborne. However, he just snarled: “Needs a bit of toughening up” and swept out.
I’ve told you all this because we need to understand various things about George Osborne, this Government’s economic vandal-in-chief. First, he’s almost a victim of his own ambition, one of those Tory boys such as David Cameron or Michael Portillo before them who was specifically groomed by the Tory establishment – in his case, in the form of Tim Bell – for greater things, in ways as toe-curlingly sinister as anything that happens in cyberspace.
Second, he’s actually a bit of wimp, and with an unfortunately unlikable face. This is why, as a politician, he has chosen the gambit of his old sparring partner and sailing companion Peter Mandelson, which is to disguise all your other shortcomings behind the mask of a pantomime villain, realising that you’ll never get anywhere by using charm. (Cameron is the exact opposite, although his public persona is as false as Osborne’s.)
If you combine these two aspects of his character, Osborne suddenly becomes both more and less terrifying. He’s less terrifying because it’s just an act, the calculated malevolence purely there to cow the rest of us into compliance with his programme of Thatcherite orthodoxy. However, where he becomes more terrifying is when you realise that, essentially, when you factor in the unswerving and – more dangerously – unquestioning devotion to a failed and discredited doctrine, he really and truly doesn’t know what he’s doing.
I keep thinking two things about this Government. The first is that its members haven’t really thought any of it through, despite the coalition’s constituent parties having had 13 and 80 years respectively to fine-tune their policies. The second is a mental image, of the type cartoonists experience, and it’s of an 11-year-old boy sitting in front of an Enigma machine and repeatedly hitting it with a hammer, just to see what might happen. There is, in other words, a stench of deranged naivety surrounding George Osborne, David Cameron and Nick Clegg, and I fear we might be hearing the phrase “I wasn’t expecting this kind of thing” quite a lot in the next few years, as they survey the wreckage.
