George osborne

Neil O'Brien's appointment as a new special adviser for George Osborne has gone down very well in the Westminster bubble, partly because of the Policy Exchange director's ability to look beyond that bubble. He has written a number of times for the Spectator, and as an insight into the man who will be advising the Chancellor, here are some of his key pieces: In this week's magazine, O'Brien points to the North's growing detachment from Westminster, with 'an almighty 83 per cent of northern voters' believing that politicians do not understand the real world. He writes: 'Westminster politicians have repeatedly promised to close the North-South gap, but failed because they ignored economic reality, and flushed our money away on stupid gimmicks.

George Osborne pulled off one of those bits of political theatre that he so enjoys today. Watching his statement in the Commons, one sensed something was up as Osborne delighted in delaying naming the new bank governor. It was an indication that, like the Mounties, the Chancellor had got his man. Moments later, a clearly delighted Osborne announced that Mark Carney, the Canadian Central Bank Governor, would be the new governor of the Bank of England. This is quite a coup for Osborne as Carney is widely regarded as the best central bank governor in the world. It also marks a clear break with all that has gone wrong in the City in the last dozen years or so. It was an open secret in Westminster that Carney was the preferred candidate of the Chancellor and his circle.

When George Osborne gives his Autumn Statement on 5 December, the OBR will publish its new forecasts for growth, deficit and debt. For the last few weeks, the consensus has been that the OBR would declare that Osborne will miss the debt target he set himself in 2010: to have the debt-to-GDP ratio falling in 2015-16. The logic behind this, as I set out in September, is pretty straightforward: the OBR will have to lower its growth forecasts, which will in turn mean lower tax revenues, higher deficits and more debt. But it now looks like Osborne might narrowly avoid failure, though not because the outlook for the economy or the government finances is any brighter.

As Fraser reported at the time, Labour put up a deficit clock on its website last month, claiming that the government was borrowing £277 million more during Tory conference than in the same four days last year. It based this on the borrowing figures available at the time, which were for the period April to August. In that period, the government had borrowed £802 a second more than in the same five months of 2011, so Labour assumed it would continue to do so in October. But new figures out yesterday show that this was not the case. In fact, looking just at borrowing in October, Labour was lowballing it by about £67 million. The ONS says the government borrowed £8.6 billion in October 2012, £2.7 billion more than the £5.

George Osborne has a dilemma to answer in his autumn statement (which must be finalised by 28 November, when it will be submitted to the Office of Budget Responsibility). He has promised to offset politically welfare cuts worth £10bn with tax increases on the wealthy. There is an added complication in that Osborne cannot afford (literally) to choke recovery by imposing levies on sources of wealth creation. This leads him, logically, to pensions and property. The FT reports that the chancellor is considering reducing the maximum level of tax relief on annual pension contributions from £50,000 to either £40,000 or £30,000. It is estimated that these changes would net the Treasury an extra £600 million or £1.8bn a year respectively.

David Cameron (and a host of other politicians, including Ed Miliband, Vince Cable and Boris Johnson) will address the CBI’s annual conference this morning. Cameron’s widely trailed speech is a call to arms; indeed, he wants to put the public sector on a war-footing. The speech will contain the usual spiel about Britain being in a ‘global race to succeed’ and the need for innovation and cutting red tape, faster decision making etc, etc, etc. You’ll know, of course, that these urgent words come from the man who feels that the decision on a third Heathrow runway cannot be made until after the next election. This fact mocks Cameron’s claim that 'the Cabinet I chair is now a Growth Cabinet...

Few politicians have put as much thought in to the team around them as George Osborne. He is a collector of talented people. Unlike most Tories, he has gone outside of CCHQ and parliament for nearly every senior appointment he’s made. But I understand that after Christmas he’ll be losing one of the most important members of his operation, Poppy Mitchell-Rose. Mitchell-Rose has acted as Osborne’s fixer and gatekeeper since he first became shadow Chancellor. On the long—and sometimes bumpy—road from opposition to government, she has been a calm sherpa who has dealt with a host of problems before they have even arisen. But she is now moving to Washington, DC, before starting a career in the private sector. I suspect that she’ll not be short of job offers.

George Osborne’s spirited bid in The Times (£) earlier this week  to appropriate the Obama victory for the Tories is a curious mirror image of the Labour Party’s arguments to the same effect. Both ignore the reality that the US is the US, not us, and Obama is Obama; formulas for election success aren’t a peel-off/stick-on tattoo, to be transferred between one body politic and another. But the article was interesting for what it told us about the Chancellor himself, quite apart from a slightly nerdy obsession with American elections. The fifth and decisive point in his piece was all about how social liberalism plus fiscal conservatism was the key to electoral success.