George osborne

After the sunshine of the Downing St rose garden, the gloom of the public finances. This morning's newspapers are full of stories about the tax hikes and spending cuts that our coalition government is looking to introduce. The Sun and the Times dwell on yesterday's forecast for a rise in VAT. The Guardian outlines possible cuts to middle-class benefits. And there's plenty more besides. Two articles, though, are particularly indicative of the tensions that the government will face.  Interviewed in the Sun, David Cameron has to go on the defensive about tax rises; insisting that "The Conservative party is still a low-tax party, a tax-cutting party – and that's in the agreement.

Philip Hammond was quietly brilliant as Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury and it would have been a travesty if he was excluded from the Cabinet. Having avoided assuming the mantle of ‘the most hated man in England’, Hammond has been handed the poisoned Transport brief. A popular saying about frying and pans and fires comes to mind as he will tasked with renewing Britain’s congested roads, baleful airports and Victorian railways amid austerity. Still, he could have been sent to Northern Ireland. Hammond’s first announcement has been to confirm George Osborne’s pledge that the £16bn Crossrail project will not be cut.

If you read only one thing today, then make a cup of tea, sit in a comfy armchair, and make sure it's Tim Montgomerie's 7,000-word review of the Conservative election campaign.  Tim has opened up his address book and spoken with many of the main players in the Tory operation - and the result isn't all that flattering.  Here's a summary passage which gives a sense of it all: "For a period, the 'Big Society' was put at the heart of the campaign. Amazingly, the Big Society was never tested in focus groups and it failed on the doorstep. One leading adviser to the campaign complained of a 'cavalier' approach to research. 'They latched on to research that backed their views and ignored any research that challenged it.

Should David Cameron just call the IMF immediately? Like, on Monday? This argument has been doing the rounds in Tory circles and tomorrow's Spectator has an important contribution from Niall Ferguson. He advises that Cameron takes a two-pronged approach. Prong one is to 'axe ruthlessly' and prong two is to call the IMF. He says: 'There is a very real danger that [things] could now spiral, Greek style, out of all control if foreign confidence in sterling slumps and long-term interest rates rise. Mr Cameron needs to do two things right away. He must instruct George Osborne to wield the axe ruthlessly with the aim of returning to a balanced budget over a credible eight- to ten-year timeframe.

George Osborne sounds a more confident note than most of his Tory bandmates in interview with the Standard today.  On top of the obligatory Ready for Government noises, he rattles off a list of London marginals which are winnable for the Tories, and adds that an overall majority is "within our grasp".  Pretty direct stuff for a politician, given all the uncertainty clogging the air in Westminster. To my eyes, though, the most significant passage could be this: "He gave a commitment to keep London's £16 billion Crossrail scheme, although he confirmed he will look for savings. 'I think Londoners would expect me to get good value for their money.

George Osborne put in a fiery and impressive performance in the Chancellor’s debate today, firing off some memorable one-liners as well as unveiling a letter from the former head of the anti-avoidance group at the Treasury questioning the sums on which the Lib Dems’ tax plans depend. Indeed, since the Lib Dems surged, Osborne has found another level to his public performances. Today’s debate win followed a good spot by Osborne on the Politics Show on Sunday.   One striking thing about the debate was how it was Darling who signaled the assault on Cable when he started querying Vince’s numbers. It’ll be fascinating to see if Brown takes any similar swipe at Clegg tomorrow; his interview in the Indyhttp://www.independent.co.

This morning, we've already seen the two primary attacks which will be used against the marriage tax break outlined by George Osborne in the Times today.  The first came courtesy of Vince Cable, who said it represents a "derisory" sum of £3 a week for those who benefit from it.  And the second was from Ed Balls – who else? – who labelled the policy as "discriminatory," because it doesn't cover every married person, and nor does it account for couples who split.  Or as he rather suggestively put it: "if your husband beats you up and leaves you you get no support." One thing worth noting is how the Tories' opponents aren't majoring on a fiscal irresponsibility angle, as they've been trying to with the national insurance cut.

In last week's Chancellor's debate, Vince Cable refused to rule out raising VAT to help fix the public finances.  Now, only a few days later, the Lib Dems are pledging not to do that.  What's more, they're saying that the Tories' plans require a raise in VAT.  And they've even got a 'VAT bombshell' poster to drive the message home. There's more than a dash of Brownite politics about this - the same seasoning I detected in the Tories' Death Tax poster.  Sure, there have been rumblings that the Tories will raise VAT.  But Osborne & Co. have denied that this is necessarily the case in recent days, and it's certainly not current Tory policy.  So the Lib Dems are effectively spinning a lie, and attacking that lie.

When Alistair Daring admitted last week that there would indeed be job losses arising from the proposed National Insurance hike, it would have struck Gordon Brown and Ed Balls like root canal surgery. This blows wide open the main part of Brown's election deceit: asking the public to look at the advantages of the borrowing, and not contemplate the flip side to the debt coin. Not to ask where the repayments will come from, or the impact of those repayments on the jobs of the future. No wonder Darling is today being made to claim the opposite. The grim truth is that every job "protected" now, due to debt, will be more than balanced out by money taken away from the economy in the form of the interest needed to serve that debt.

David Cameron said as much in his Today Programme interview, but now we know for sure: we've heard everything we're going to about Tory spending cuts this year.  George Osborne confirms the news in an interview with the Guardian today: "In the interview, the shadow chancellor also disclosed, for the first time, that he would not reduce public spending by more than £6.5bn in the current financial year. He said £6bn would come from efficiencies, and £500m from cuts to child trust funds and working tax credits for the better off. There would be no further 'in year' cuts in his emergency budget, scheduled within 50 days of a possible Tory victory, he said." It's tempting to point out that £6.

As declaration day (the rather pompus name that news organisations have come up with for the moment when Gordon Brown actually calls the election) draws nearer, the Tory campaign is sharpening up. This morning’s operation on National Insurance was impressive, enabling the party to get a second set of headlines out of its plan to stop Labour’s National Insurance rise. The letter from 23 business leaders supporting the Tory position worked on several levels. First, it got the Tories’ tax cut back on the top of the news agenda along with its clear message: seven out of ten workers will be better off under the Conservatives. Second, it strengthened the Tory case that the risk to the economy is to increase the tax on jobs not cutting government waste.

Last week, it was all doom, gloom, debt, the deficit and austerity from the Tories – and rightly so.  But, this week, they've returned to the sunny uplands.  First, we had George Osborne's tax cut for seven out of every ten people.  And, today, we had David Cameron's closing speech at the Tory Big Society event.  I lost count of how many times he dropped words like "hope" and "change".  And, yes, he even namechecked Barack Obama.  But don't give up just yet  – there was more to it than that.

I think Osborne’s main victory tonight would be to reassure those who thought him a clueless idiot. The left demonise him, and it’s easy for the right to despair at him too (yes, guilty). But the figure we saw tonight was calm, collected and assured – and I reckon this was his achievement. He allayed fears. Expectations of his performance would have been rock bottom, and he’d have surpassed them easily. He was playing it safe. Vince Cable did his after-dinner speaking comedy act (I met William Hague in the ‘spin room’ afterwards, who swears that some of Cables lines were nicked from his repertoire), and the studio audience loved him for it. But Cable is not going to be Chancellor, he can afford to take risks.