George osborne

Should ministers have so many special advisers? Should a party that promised to cut the number of these SpAds if it came to government admit that it got this wrong, having increased their number? The arguments in favour of more of these political staffers in government are well-rehearsed: if they’re good, they add expertise and political nouse to a department and they make it easier for ministers to communicate what they’re up to. Some are hopeless at both these things, but the best ones – and there are many excellent ones in both main parties at the moment – often keep the show on the road and ensure reforms actually

The last time David Cameron sat down with The Spectator for an interview, he was on a train and looking rather worried. There were just weeks to go until the general election and the polls were not moving. At the time, almost no one — and certainly not him — imagined that he was on the cusp of a historic election victory that would not just sweep the Tories to power but send Labour into an abyss. This time, we meet on another train. But he’s far more relaxed, reflecting on winning The Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year award and recalling how election night brought him some of the ‘happiest

At the start of this week, everyone was wondering how George Osborne was going to get out of trouble on tax credits, avoid a deeply damaging row over police cuts, all while still keeping to his surplus target. But thanks to the Office for Budget Responsibility upgrading its forecasts, Osborne was able to scrap the tax credit changes, protect the police budget and maintain his plan for a £10 billion surplus by the end of the parliament. But now, an even bigger challenge awaits Osborne: the EU renegotiation. I argue in my Sun column today that it is now the biggest threat to his chances of becoming Prime Minister. Boris

George Osborne’s Autumn Statement, with its backtracking on the slashing of tax credits, leaves a huge question hanging over 21st-century Britain: who has the cojones to do something about the destructive culture of welfarism? Anybody? It seems not. Both the supposedly small-state right and the apparently pro-work left have become bizarrely reluctant to address the spread of the autonomy-sapping welfare state into more people’s lives. Look, the tax credits thing is definitely complicated. It would have been dodgy to cut them without first putting meaningful pressure on business to pay people a proper wage. It is, however, weird and wrong that the state effectively tops up people’s pay packets, so

By now, George Osborne had hoped to have completed his austerity programme. Instead, he finds himself making what is, still, the most ambitious round of cuts of any finance minister in the developed world. The Chancellor is paying the price for the leisurely pace that he decided to take in the last parliament – due to his habit of buying time by deferring pain. The Chancellor still doesn’t seem to be in too much of a rush. In his spending review statement this week, he decided to spend some £83 billion more over the parliament than he said he would at the general election.  Foreign aid is not just protected, but

In the peroration of his statement today, George Osborne declared that the Tories were ‘the mainstream representatives of the working people of Britain.’ This is how he wants to position the Tories and it is why the tax credit changes had to go: they were getting in the way of the Tory attempt to rebrand themselves as the workers’ party. By ditching the tax credit changes, the Tories can now return to this theme—and can try and gain maximum political benefit from the national living wage. Osborne believes that with Jeremy Corbyn / John McDonnell leading the Labour party, the Tories have a real opportunity to pick up support from