It is an exciting day for Liberty Osborne, the Chancellor’s daughter, to join him at work. The windows at HM Treasury are boarded up, workmen line the road replacing the bombproof (but not student-proof) glass. Graffiti defaces the walls, but although several politicians are named and shamed in spray paint (‘Why did Nick Clegg cross the road? Because he’d promised not to’) there is nothing unkind about the author of the cuts: George Osborne himself.
When we meet the Chancellor at 10.30 a.m. in 11 Downing St, he does not look the slightest bit like a man under siege. Seven-year-old Liberty bounds out of his study, waving at us cheerfully. The Chancellor is no less upbeat. As we sit down in what was, for nine years, Gordon Brown’s study, he points to the various improvements he’s made. ‘This door was kept locked for all the time Brown was here,’ he says, pointing to the door adjoining No. 10. ‘They paid someone to police the corridor, just to make the point that this was Brown’s territory, and people couldn’t just march through.’ It is now a free passage. All one happy family, albeit a family with more members than the Tories originally planned.
For five years, Osborne was number two to David Cameron — ‘the second longest-serving shadow chancellor in history’, he says. Now, Nick Clegg is number two — and the focus of the protesters’ wrath. Is he surprised it is the Lib Dems who have taken the brunt of the hatred? Osborne says he has ‘sympathy’ for the Lib Dems because the Tories, too, once had to drop their opposition to tuition fee increases — ‘pretty much the first thing we did’ under David Cameron. ‘We had learned that there is no shortcut to power. If you lose your intellectual integrity, it is a long road back.’
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