George Osborne: We’re not trying to make a fetish of division

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. So, of course, and you know, I was an MP at the time of the Iraq war and have had most of my political life under the shadow of the way that debate was conducted.