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. No wonder northern voters think politicians ignore them and don’t understand them. Unless we change direction, it’s going to become harder to refer honestly to ‘one nation’: because our country will steadily come apart.’
In April, he wrote a piece arguing that London’s separation from the rest of Britain is becoming more and more pronounced every year, and criticising the ‘Londonitis’ endemic among politicians, civil servants and journalists, saying:
‘Polls show that Britain’s political class has reached a new peak of unpopularity in recent weeks.
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