George osborne

If the next Tory leadership election is a marathon, George Osborne fell down at mile six with that 2012 Budget. Most of those watching assumed that was the end of him. But Osborne got up, dusted himself down and started making his way back through the pack. Today’s speech showed that Osborne thinks he’s now back in that race. It was littered with the personal pronoun. It included a tribute to his parents who founded what Osborne called a small manufacturing company’ which the rest of us call Osborne and Little, the up-market wallpaper merchants beloved of the interior designing classes. It also showed off his acid sense of humour, there were a slew of jokes at the Miliband brothers’ expense.

Come and have a look – cheap, cheap debt! Very, very good – cheap, cheap debt! The £1 fish singer may have been deported, but his spirit lives on in George Osborne's launch announcement today. The Tory response to Ed Miliband’s cost-of-living pledge seems to be more adventures into sub-prime. The Chancellor will press ahead with a second phase of his deeply controversial Help To Buy scheme - and three months earlier then he planned. Recent history has taught us to worry when vote-hungry politicians try to manipulate the housing market to provide loans to people who otherwise could not afford them. This is why so many economists are amazed at what Osborne is doing.

In Manchester this week, there’ll be much talk from the Tories about how they are gunning for a majority. But in private, many senior Tories will admit that being the largest party in another hung parliament is a more realistic aim. As Matthew d’Ancona reveals in the Telegraph this morning, there has been talk—albeit brief-- between the principals about a second coalition. Matt also reminds us how, if it had not been for Cameron’s intervention, a mansion tax would have been imposed by the coalition. I suspect that if there is to be another coalition, the Liberal Democrats would insist on some kind of mansion tax. It has come for them a proxy for wider questions about how much influence they would wield inside a second Tory-Lib Dem coalition.

A banker of my acquaintance went to Switzerland skiing this winter. A luxury he normally could not afford, but he’d just remortgaged thanks to George Osborne’s Funding For Lending scheme and saved a packet. To his amazement, he was being bailed out by the Chancellor – he didn’t need the money but thought he’d take it if it was going. The cash certainly tricked down - to the après-ski champagne bars of Verbier. The Chancellor’s stimulus makes the cheapest loans only available to the rich (ie, those with at least 40 per cent equity in their house) and like all of the Treasury’s cheap debt wheezes it was just another subsidy to a grossly overpaid consumer who really, really didn’t need it.

'Labour plans have a £27 billion black hole,' says the Sunday Times, quoting  analysis from George Osborne's Treasury.  If true, that’s the first piece of good economic news we’ll have heard from Labour. Osborne’s black holes have been way, way bigger – well over £100 billion so far. In his excellent new book about journalese, Robert Hutton offers this definition of black hole: 'A point in space so dense it creates a gravitational field so strong that not even light can escape. Or, in newspapers, a gap. Especially in finance, where it typically refers to any funding shortfall over £1 million.' Parties love casting a slide rule over each other's policies, declaring that they don't add up and use phrases like 'black hole'.

Poor Vince Cable. He just can't help but brim with joy about the economy. He's often spotted skipping across Parliament square to the Business department, humming 'Oh, Happy Day!' under his breath at the latest set of GDP figures. George Osborne and Cable's Tory colleagues are always having to tell Vince to calm down a bit: he doesn't want to seem too complacent about the clouds lifting from the economy. But even such a joyful Lib Dem as Dr Cable must have been a little dispirited to read that everyone has written his speech this morning up as an attempt to undermine George Osborne. 'I think George Osborne's comments the other day were spot on!

Listen to Osborne and Balls' exchange at Treasury questions here:- listen to ‘Osborne at Treasury Questions: 'We're enjoying this'’ on Audioboo 'I hope this is not our last encounter across this despatch box,' George Osborne said rather slyly to Ed Balls this morning at Treasury questions. 'Because we are enjoying it.' The Tories were in a good mood, because they've decided that they can now start to talk about the economic clouds lifting, and this means that they can say that everything Labour has ever said is wrong, wrong, wrong. 'Cheer up Ed!' Sajid Javid shouted cheerily at the shadow Chancellor as another Tory MP used their question to say that George Osborne has been absolutely correct in every decision he's ever made.

One of the Tories' real failings over the past few years has been to ignore the spores of a problem, and then wait until it has mushroomed into something they can't handle. Take the bedroom tax, food banks, or zero hours contracts: all of which Labour has managed to brand as a sign of the evil coalition's failure, complete with scary names, partly because ministers never bothered to frame these issues themselves. So this morning George Osborne attempted to trip up Labour in its latest charge against the Tories: the cost of living. And he got in before his opponents have made it up to full speed. It would have been tempting for the Chancellor to give a triumphant speech in which he teased and ridiculed his opponents now that things are going his way.

On this balmy summer's evening, George Osborne has popped over to east London to get down with some of the tech kids at the Campus Party in The O2. Judging from the above picture, the chancellor is quite impressed at what Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, had to show him: https://twitter.com/George_Osborne/statuses/375312989236109312 Just don't expect tax rates anyone can edit.

George Osborne is not relinquishing his love for High Speed 2 anytime soon. On his welcome return to television this morning, Andrew Marr gave the Chancellor a grilling over the new line. Osborne in return defended the government's position both on monetary and ideological grounds. With the most recent costings of £50 - 80 billion thrown around, the Chancellor added some clarity on how much he will authorise for construction of the new line: ‘We have set the budget for £42bn for the construction costs. That includes, by the way, a big contingency. As we demonstrated with the Olympic Games, we can deliver these big projects actually sometimes under budget. I think we have got a good budget, which has got a very big contingency in it, we've set a budget.

When will today's politicians be able to stop wrestling with Tony Blair's ghost? Not for a while it seems - partly because they don't want to. George Osborne decided to use the Kind of Spin as a means of spinning last night's terrible defeat for the Coalition government on Syria when he appeared on the Today programme. As well as referring to the shadow Blair and Iraq cast over the debate, yesterday, the Chancellor made clear that the Prime Minister had tried to shake off that shadow by conducting things 'in a different approach'. he said: 'The shadow of Iraq pervaded the whole debate yesterday both on the media and in Parliament and at times MPs on both sides of the argument actually by mistake used Saddam Hussein's name instead of Assad's name.