Should Osborne start planning a second career in soft furnishings?

Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business

I’ve come up with a slogan to revive flagging Conservative canvassers — and an encouraging report from the doorsteps. My man in the housing estates of suburban York, of which I wrote two weeks ago, told me ‘the Labour vote is collapsing’ two days before reporters started using that phrase on Radio 4. He also said he was still meeting large numbers of ‘don’t knows’. So there’s everything to play for. But no one could say the Tory campaign has gone according to plan — and that fact is adding new venom to criticism of George Osborne, who is the campaign’s director as well as would-be chancellor. Wondering how much of the venom emanates from sources close to Lord Mandelson, I have been conducting my own canvass about Osborne in the financial world — and I’m sorry to say I haven’t found a single respondent in the past ten days who wholeheartedly endorses him.