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. As far as Mr Osborne is concerned, if you make the case for spending cuts plus abortion and gay marriage, well bingo, you’ve got the women voters in the bag and success is yours. As he observed, ‘I wouldn’t change the abortion laws and I strongly support gay marriage on principle.’
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