There is a cracking scoop in today’s Mail on Sunday. An anonymous Tory backbench MP has excoriated George Osborne’s performance as Chancellor. The MP repeats many of the arguments made by Fraser on Thursday, as the latest lines of the Budget were excised. Osborne is, apparently lazy, uninterested in economics and hubristic. The MP implies that Osborne’s mind is not sufficient to pull this off as chancellor. He writes:
”[Nigel] Lawson used to say that he had to work 18 hours a day and virtually gave up alcohol just to keep on top of things when he was Chancellor. And he had a formidable intellect to start with.’
Osborne’s shortcomings, in the MP’s view, also make him unsuitable to be election co-ordinator, a job in which he has not excelled:
‘His reputation as a political strategist is a huge fallacy. This is the man who stopped us winning an outright victory at the last Election against one of the most unpopular Labour governments of all time.
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