Osborne can still see off Boris

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[/audioplayer]When George Osborne last stood up to deliver a budget, he had reached his post-election apotheosis. His economic (and political) strategy had been amply vindicated by the election result. He was, for the first time, regarded as David Cameron’s most likely successor. By the time the Chancellor sat down that status had been confirmed: his announcement of a National Living Wage had shown he was serious about the Tories’ claim to be the new workers’ party. Yet when Osborne comes to the despatch box on Wednesday to present this year’s budget, he will do so not as the prime minister-presumptive, but rather as a Chancellor in need of a political pick-me-up. To become the front-runner in a Tory leadership contest, even one several years away, is to put a target on your back, and Osborne has had a tough time lately. He has had to scrap the tax-credit changes he unveiled last July. This time he was keen to create a single rate of pension tax relief — which would have hurt higher-rate taxpayers. But he has been forced into ruling that out after a backbench and media backlash. One senior Conservative MP, who as recently as the start of this year was intending to back Osborne as leader, tells me that the seriousness with which this idea was considered has led to a ‘breakdown of trust between the Chancellor and the parliamentary party’. Osborne also finds himself on the opposite side to most party activists on the great issue of our time: the EU referendum. He wants to stay while most of them want to go. In the leadership stakes, he now finds himself trailing his ‘frenemy’ Boris Johnson. Even one of the Chancellor’s ministerial allies now admits: ‘The share price has had a profit warning and ticked down a bit.