Watch: George Osborne grilled about his great deception over Brexit

The Chancellor gave evidence to the Treasury select committee today, and he was challenged about The Spectator’s analysis of his systematic attempt to mislead over the cost of Brexit. A loss of £4,300 per household, he said: a figure that he fabricated using three tricks.

1. He disguised an increase as a decrease: the Treasury study suggests that GDP would be a 29 per cent bigger in 2030 with Brexit and and 37 per cent bigger with no Brexit. So the choice is between two significant rises. By no stretch of the English language is this a ‘fall.’
2. Osborne conflated household income with the very different notion of GDP, so he could arrive at a higher (and scarier) figure.
3. He then divided the difference in GDP by the number of households today, rather than the number of households in 2030, to cook up an even higher figure.

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And he got away with it all because the analysis focused on how the Treasury arrived at its figure of GDP being 6.2