The biography of a 41-year-old in his first major cabinet job is inevitably the story about a career, maybe even a character, still under construction; it is still far too early to call George Osborne’s tenure at the Treasury either a success or a failure.
While not officially ‘authorised’, this is a friendly biography. The author’s sources include a raft of Tory modernisers, many now themselves MPs and hardly likely to upset a senior colleague. Inevitably the Tories’ long haul back from 1997 looms large, but the cast-list of apparatchiks and the nuances of modernisation are for Westminster specialists, rather than general readers.
The chancellor’s meteoric rise is familiar territory. A relatively late-developing school swot from a posh-boho background, he discovered networking at Oxford then applied himself single-mindedly to a political career inside the “guild” of professional politicos and speechwriters. MP for Tatton since 2005, he was shadowing Brown as chancellor three years later, getting the job himself in 2010.
Mr Osborne displayed remarkable application over a decade, flogging what must have frequently seemed a dead Tory horse: repeatedly he got alongside, then defended, a series of more or less unelectable leaders. Serially, he escaped the wreckage, picked the next ‘winner’ and, a talented tactician and wordsmith, made himself indispensable. He was there for John Major’s ‘back-me-or-sack-me’ moment, advised Douglas Hogg during the BSE crisis, worked for William Hague and backed Iain Duncan Smith before becoming Michael Howard’s protégé.
Other young Tory modernisers, even for a while David Cameron, came and went, but Mr Osborne never lost sight of his goal. He bought into the Tories at the bottom, intending to ride them all the way to the top.
Janan Ganesh struggles to reveal what drives Mr Osborne’s ambition. Ideology remains in minor key, and there is no personal disaster to provide grit in the oyster. The chancellor likes history, and is a shrewd psychologist good at reading colleagues and opponents, who believes that only political power affords the opportunity to get things done. Most of all he simply appears to relish ‘the game’. There is serious gambling blood in the chancellor’s gene-pool, and Tony Blair is a hero, less for any legacy than for consistently winning office.
Occasionally his image is humanised: a gap-year trip left him entranced by the Sahara’s beauty. Coolly cerebral by nature, he has an occasional weakness for glamorous company or exclusive surroundings – the Bullingdon, or Deripaska’s yacht. He is good company in private, treats his staff well (often a telling point). He is a political realist who does not bear grudges (except for Gordon Brown) – but is seemingly baffled by Boris Johnson’s success.
The Austerity Chancellor became austere only as needs must. His long march to fiscal Conservatism began from “sharing the proceeds of growth”; he stuck closely to Labour spending plans and, like many others, failed to call the end of the boom. His 2007 Party Conference announcement on cutting inheritance tax caused Gordon Brown to bottle out of a snap election he might have won. Even then, however, the un-ideological Mr Osborne did not support unfunded tax cuts, and, post-banking crisis, his views have solidified around fiscal orthodoxy: policy at last trumped politics for the chancellor.
In office, Mr Osborne has mastered austerity. Two years out from an election, his tactical side must know that he also needs to master growth. Mr Ganesh is equivocal as to whether Mr Osborne has prime-ministerial ambitions. For one thing, he is sufficiently self-aware to know he is no “man of the people”. For another, he prefers actual to symbolic power, even if actual power is less visible. Nevertheless, it feels unlikely on the basis of this portrait that this clever gambler would not chance his arm at the top job in a post-Cameron world, and this book provides a useful sketch of a man whose public career is still in its relatively early stages.
