This is a story of impossible gifts. The Chancellor, George Gideon Oliver Osborne, stands to inherit a 17th-century baronetcy and a large fortune accumulated by his enterprising father. He was also blessed with intelligence, charm, ambition, eloquence and the mysterious ability to seek out power and use it for his own ends.
His biographer, Janan Ganesh, has written a pacy, well-researched book whose only fault is its unquestioning fealty to its subject. Osborne excelled at St Paul’s and Oxford and then strolled into Conservative Central Office as a special adviser. No career but politics interested him. At 25, he was holding one-to-one briefings with the prime minister, John Major. In 2001, he became the youngest member of the Commons, after bagging the ultra-safe seat of Tatton. ‘I’m buying at the bottom of the market,’ was how he described his position within the Tory party.
He was one of the elite group of advisers who prepared William Hague, and later Michael Howard, for the weekly joust with Tony Blair at Prime Minister’s Questions. Osborne supplied Howard with one of his best-known put-downs. ‘This grammar school boy isn’t going to take any lessons from that public school boy …’
When Cameron took over, Osborne was asked to pen more golden phrases. Blair had famously summarised his ideals in three words, ‘education, education, education’. Cameron offered three letters: ‘NHS.’ It was Osborne’s line.
Ganesh’s adulatory tone fades as his subject comes closer to power. He notes the ‘brittle voice and icy mien’ that will forever prevent Osborne from assuming the premiership. Osborne has a tragic flaw — the desire for grand connections — which drew him into controversy in 2008 after he boarded Nat Rothschild’s yacht in Corfu where he met Peter Mandelson and the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.
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