George osborne

  [audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/insidethetorieseudogfight/media.mp3" title="James Forsyth, Fraser Nelson and Isabel Hardman discuss the Tory dogfight over Europe"] Listen [/audioplayer] Many Tories had doubts about David Cameron’s EU renegotiation, but only Boris Johnson was promised a piece of legislation to assuage his particular concerns. It was quite a compliment. The so-called Sovereignty Bill was, in effect, the Get Boris Onside Act. It was designed to deal with the Mayor of London’s fears about the relationship between the British parliament and courts and the EU. It was also mooted that Boris would be offered a top cabinet job — perhaps Foreign Secretary.

George Osborne’s plan for this referendum was to turn it into a question of the future versus the past, for both the country and the Tory party. He wanted the voters to see the Out campaign as a bunch of people who wanted to take Britain back to a bygone era. Inside the Tory party, his aim was to have the talent and the ambition on the IN side with only old war horses and the passed over and bitter on the other side. But the events of the past 36 hours have blown this plan off course. Out now has one of the most popular politicians in the country on board in Boris, as well as one of the intellectual driving forces behind Tory modernisation and the party’s new social justice agenda in Gove.

Sajid Javid will campaign for Britain to stay in the EU. The Business Secretary’s decision is a blow to the Leave camp which had been hopefully of recruiting him; Javid had spoken in the past of how he was ‘not afraid’ of Britain leaving the EU as it ‘would open up opportunities’. Senior figures on the Leave side had hoped that Javid would help them persuade voters that quitting the EU would not be bad for business. Those familiar with the Business Secretary’s thinking say that what has swung Javid to IN is his sense that it is just too risky for Britain to leave right now given the parlous state of the global economy.

The Chancellor certainly will have plenty to boast about in his next Budget. Today's figures show an employment rate of 74.1pc, the highest ever recorded in Britain - better than Nigel Lawson's record, better than anyone's. Tax cuts and welfare reform have proved a potent combination. This makes it harder for Osborne to sustain his narrative about a scary "cocktail of risk", part of the general strategy of keeping voters fearful ahead of the EU referendum. With record employment and zero inflation - a striking contrast with the Eurozone - things really could be a lot worse. Against such a backdrop, voters might well wonder what else Britain could achieve by striking out on its own.

Upbeat or downbeat? I asked last month whether the mood where you live is energised by enterprise or demoralised by public-sector retreat — or both. Replies poured in while the news mostly got worse. Governor Carney warned that ‘the UK cannot help but be affected by an unforgiving global environment and sustained financial market turbulence’ as shares took another dive. BP and Shell announced profit falls and job cuts. The Brexit debate took off, but the migrant benefits row overwhelmed any sensible discussion of economic pros and cons, on which voters must so far be utterly confused. Then again, it wasn’t all bad: like-for-like retail sales surged by 2.

Ruth Davidson has been previously tipped as a front-runner in the Tory leadership race. The Scottish Conservative leader has proved popular with both the public and her own party, with the Tory MP Heidi Allen even naming Davidson as her preferred choice for leader in an interview last year. Alas, those hoping that Davidson has what it takes to stop George Osborne's leadership ambitions becoming a reality, will need to have a strong word with the woman of the moment. Speaking on Daily Politics, Davidson ruled herself out of the race. She said that she has 'no interest in the job' -- pointing to the fact that she isn't even an MP: https://twitter.com/daily_politics/status/697035070427652097 Happily her colleague Jacob Rees-Mogg is already trying to change her mind.

Mr S notices that the above video is circulating a lot on social media at the moment. An unfortunate choice of words, from a pro-immigration Chancellor. Perhaps George Osborne was paying homage to Rowan Atkinson's Not the Nine O'Clock News sketch. Or perhaps the Chancellor needs to get a little better at not walking into such traps if he hopes to succeed David Cameron.

When George Osborne announced at the Conservative Party conference in 2014 that he would force companies such as Google, Facebook and others to pay more tax in the UK, some of those firms were privately incandescent. As a Daily Telegraph journalist covering the conference at the time, I was witness to a rare example of usually conciliatory American firms eager to critique government policy in robust Anglo-Saxon. Why, they asked, didn’t the UK see the wider benefits of having major digital employers based here, and didn’t ministers understand that they were paying their due taxes where they were founded, in America? In public, technology-friendly commentators suggested the announcement was all politics and no practicality.

Even though, as Fraser argued last week, Google has done nothing wrong in agreeing to pay £130 million to settle its UK tax claims, MPs were in a furious mood about the agreement when they discussed it in the Commons this afternoon. John McDonnell asked an urgent question on the deal, and found, unusually, that he had support from across the House. It wasn’t just Labour MPs who stood up to condemn what they saw as one standard for their constituents, who are hounded by the taxman over relatively small claims, and another for big powerful multinationals like Google. Tory MPs joined in, too, with Steve Baker telling David Gauke that the deal was ‘at once derisory, substantial, lawful and completely unacceptable to the public’.

‘It's hard to think of a time when we didn't all fancy the Chancellor of the Exchequer,' begins George Osborne’s entry in this year’s ‘The Tatler List’ – the society magazine’s annual compilation of ‘the people who really matter’. This year Osborne is placed at number 4, trumped only by Princess Charlotte, Ant and Dec, and Prince George, and a full 13 places higher than the next politician on the list, Mayoral hopeful Zac Goldsmith. But is it really all that hard to remember a time when ‘we didn’t all fancy the Chancellor’? The magazine puts his attraction down to his ‘big brain, sexy hair cut, and control of the biggest bank account in the country’.

George Osborne’s Newsnight interview has drawn ire from the Eurosceptics chiefly because the Chancellor used it to stamp on any suggestion that there might be a second EU referendum in which Brussels offered the UK all the changes it wanted in the first place in order to tempt it back into the European Union. But Osborne also reiterated last night that the ‘Treasury is 100 per cent now focused on achieving the renegotiation’ and wasn’t drawing up contingency plans for Brexit. The problem for ministers is that any admission or leak of such contingency plans would be written up as a Whitehall panic, or a secret desire on the part of the Prime Minister to leave the EU.