George osborne

The Daily Mirror has today splashed on the fact that Rupert Harrison, chief economic adviser to the British government, has had a pay increase and is now on £95,000. Outrageous, says Kevin Maguire of the Mirror. I agree: he should be on far more. The British government is in the most almighty financial mess and the Chancellor of the Exchequer needs good advice. The national debt is soaring - by the time you finish reading this paragraph, it will have risen by more than £95,000. Money spent on someone who can help the government control this appalling situation would be money well spent. The Mirror says that Osborne has simply given his 'mate' a pay rise. God knows I have my criticisms of Osborne, but no one can accuse him of hiring his mates.

Next year's general election looks like being the most gruesomely entertaining in years. Entertaining because no-one knows what is going to happen; gruesome because of the protagonists and the sorry misfortune that someone has to win it. All we can say for certain is that the Lib Dems will receive a doing. I still don't think that person will be David Cameron. In part for reasons previously detailed here. The single biggest thing preventing a thumping Labour victory is Ed Miliband. This is, it is true, a sturdy peg upon which the Tories may hang their hopes but it still may not prove sturdy enough. Not least because, by the standards they set themselves, this government has failed. It came to power promising to put Britain's finances in order.

As Fraser points out, David Cameron has gone from saying the deficit has been brought down by a third to claiming it has been halved, but with the often unspoken caveat that this is as a share of GDP. After the Prime Minister dropped this claim into his speech today without that very important small print, journalists grilled his official spokesman on whether Cameron was misleading voters at the afternoon lobby briefing. I’ve written up the transcript of our attempts to ask the same question many different ways. Journalist: When the Prime Minister said in his speech this afternoon the government had halved the deficit, did he qualify that in any way? Spokesman: How do you mean?

Tomorrow, in a sign of how keen the Tories are to keep the political debate focused on it, both David Cameron and George Osborne will give speeches on the economy. Cameron will announce that he is bringing forward a scheme to offer first-time buyers under 40 a 20% discount on 100,000 new home. This scheme had originally been slated for the Tory manifesto but will now be up and running before May. Inside Number 10, they hope that this scheme will help demonstrate that there are tangible benefits for voters to sticking with the Tories and their long term economic plan.   Later on, Osborne will use an address in New York to challenge Ed Miliband on whether Labour would repay any of the national debt.

Today’s Treasury Questions was a bit odd, not least because neither George Osborne nor Ed Balls were there, so everyone seemed to be quite keen to get the thing over with. Labour’s latest line of attack is to force Treasury ministers into ruling out or obfuscating over whether or not a Tory government would put up VAT after the General Election. Here is the first exchange, between Shabana Mahmood and David Gauke: Shabana Mahmood: 'The Minister has failed to rule out another tax cut for the richest 1% of earners in our country. As he signalled in his answer, the Prime Minister has made £7 billion-worth of unfunded tax promises for the next Parliament.

Competence versus chaos—that’s what the Tory leadership want to frame the next election as a choice between. Hence George Osborne’s repetition of this phrase five times in one brief interview with the BBC’s Nick Robinson. The Tories want to make the voters think that they offer competence and everyone else chaos. As George Osborne puts it, ‘And it’s not just Liberal Democrats, it’s Labour, UKIP, you can put them all into the same mix. What they’re offering is a chaotic alternative of higher taxes, higher borrowing, a return to economic chaos.

All the talk about the ‘colossal’ cuts to come if the Tories win re-election has been predicated on the assumption that the Tories are committed to running a £23 billion surplus in 2019/20. But this assumption is wrong. As David Gauke told Andrew Neil just now, ‘At the moment the OBR predicts that we will have a surplus of £23 billion, but we’re not making a commitment to the British people, that’s what the number will be in 2019.’ Instead, I understand — after extensive conversations with members of the Chancellor’s circle — that the Tories intend to start increasing spending in line with inflation once the Budget is back in surplus.

A lot of political types are very cross with the ‘biased media’ today. Ukip is currently the most aerated because some journalists ‘fabricated’ (which is today synonymous with ‘transcribed’) some remarks Nigel Farage made about whether or not restaurants are right to tell women to put napkins over themselves when breastfeeding. Number 10 is very angry with the BBC’s Norman Smith because he talked about the Road to Wigan Pier which is not an OK way of describing the public spending cuts still to come (but the IFS describing them as ‘grotesque’ and ‘colossal’ apparently is). Labour has been annoyed for months that journalists keep pointing out mistakes that Ed Miliband makes.

George Osborne appears to have delivered a successful Autumn Statement, but are there some dark secrets in the details? In this week's View from 22 podcast, Fraser Nelson, James Forsyth and I discuss the Chancellor's last major economic speech of this Parliament, the political consequences of the new measures announced and what it means for the next election.