George osborne

The Chancellor gave evidence to the Treasury select committee today, and he was challenged about The Spectator’s analysis of his systematic attempt to mislead over the cost of Brexit. A loss of £4,300 per household, he said: a figure that he fabricated using three tricks. He disguised an increase as a decrease: the Treasury study suggests that GDP would be a 29 per cent bigger in 2030 with Brexit and and 37 per cent bigger with no Brexit. So the choice is between two significant rises. By no stretch of the English language is this a ‘fall.’ Osborne conflated household income with the very different notion of GDP, so he could arrive at a higher (and scarier) figure.

It’s a good day for the Conservatives to bury bad news, when all attention is on Labour and the SNP’s election performances. So that must be why in the past few minutes Nicky Morgan has announced she is U-turning on the government’s plans to force all schools in England to become academies. The Education Secretary will no longer force good schools to change their structure, but will instead focus on selling the benefits of academies within the education community. This is a significant shift. In reality, it is all the government could do as there were too many Tory MPs opposed to the plans as set out in the White Paper for it to ever make it through the Commons as a piece of legislation.

Last night lobby hacks gathered with their favourite SpAds in tow for the Westminster correspondents' dinner. This year's guest of honour was George Osborne, who proceeded to win over the crowd with a jibe-filled speech. Osborne -- who has previously accused the BBC of harbouring 'imperial ambitions' -- did manage to find time to include a serious message alongside his many parliamentary put-downs. He urged Auntie to work alongside local news rather than against. However, it was his jibes against both his colleagues and himself that received the biggest laughs from the well-hydrated audience. Referring to his esteemed guests, Osborne said that never had there been so many big egos in one room since John Bercow dined out alone.

There are moments when one wonders whether one is seeing and hearing the same things as others. For me such a moment occurred a fortnight ago when reading The Spectator’s weekly column by our political editor, James Forsyth. James is exceptionally well plugged in to the world of Westminster, but — beyond that — a person of cool and sensitive judgment, so I read what he writes with attention. He said this: ‘[The Prime Minister] is campaigning with no thought for the feelings of those in the party who disagree with him. It is one thing for a leader to disagree with close to half of his MPs and most of his activists, but quite another not to do it respectfully.’ And for the first time in my life I had literally no idea what James was on about.

The EU referendum rumbles ever closer but after a bad week for the leave campaign following Barack Obama's controversial intervention can those calling for Brexit fight back? And is Nicky Morgan staging a climbdown over Tory plans for academies? Spectator editor Fraser Nelson speaks to James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman about what this week holds. Speaking on today's Coffee House podcast, Isabel says those calling for Brexit must now find a way of calming peoples' fears about what life outside the EU would look like. She says: 'I think it was definitely a much better week for remain than for leave because you had the most powerful man in the world making an intervention on the remain side.

So far the campaign for the EU referendum has resembled a contest as to which side can spin the most lurid and least plausible horror stories. On the one hand, the ‘in’ campaign claims that we’ll be £4,300 worse off if we leave; that budget airlines will stop serving Britain and that we will become more prone to terror attacks. Not to be outdone, the ‘out’ side warns that we will be crushed by a fresh avalanche of regulation and immigration, and more prone to terror attacks.

The most striking thing about the Treasury’s forecast of the impact of Brexit is the relative modesty of its claim that by 2030, assuming a UK-EU trade deal akin to the one negotiated by Canada, ‘our GDP would be 6.2 per cent lower’ while ‘families would be £4,300 worse off’. Since those quotes come from the foreword signed by George Osborne, many voters will distrust the whole document — in which case they might prefer the even more modest ‘worst case’ of a 2.2 per cent GDP hit by 2030 predicted by non-partisan think-tank Open Europe alongside what it calls ‘a far more realistic’ range of possible outcomes ‘between a 0.8 per cent permanent loss to GDP… and a 0.6 per cent permanent gain’.

Michael Gove has been making his case for Brexit and doing his best to knock the stuffing out of the 'remain' campaign. He started the day on the Today programme, spelling out why he thought Britain was best off outside the EU. In his pitch to the nation, he said: 'I want us to vote to leave the European Union before it's too late, because that's the safer choice for Britain. If we vote to stay, we're not settling for a secure status quo, we're voting to be hostages, locked in the back of the car, driven headlong towards deeper EU integration.' The Justice Secretary then gave a speech later in the day in which he put forward in greater detail why he thought the opposite side in the EU debate are treating the electorate like children.

George Osborne's warning over what Brexit will cost the UK economy has dominated the headlines for much of the day. But how have the Treasury figures gone down in Westminster? Based on the number of Tory MPs queuing up to slam the Chancellor's claims, it would seem not very well at all: Kwasi Kwarteng said he thought the figures were 'absurd'. He attacked the Treasury as an organisation not qualified to make predictions about economic outcomes following its failure to predict the 2008 credit crunch: John Redwood also used the same word to describe his disdain for the warning that Brexit would cost British families £4,300. He said the predictions for what will happen in 2030 were 'completely worthless'.