George osborne

Ignore the numbers, the spin and the bleak borrowing – there is only one question that needs answering. What colour is the Chancellor’s tie? Ladbrokes were offering bets on the subject, and Mr S understands a significant amount of cash has changed hands on the subject: 1/2 Blue 3/1 Purple 4/1 Green 10/1 Red 12/1 Pink 12/1 Grey 16/1 Yellow 16/1 Orange 16/1 Black 25/1 White 66/1 Hi-vis Ever the trickster, Osborne seems to have confounded the punters. Is his tie sludge green, grey or black? It seems like the matter should be referred to some sort of independent Office of Budget Betting Responsibility. Ladbrokes are yet to call it…

I have just been on Adam Boulton’s Sky News show, talking about the forthcoming Autumn Statement with Ann Pettifor, a left-wing economist. “I bet you didn’t expect me to defend George Osborne,” she told me, after our discussion finished. The UK economy is doing well, she argued, because Osborne has been borrowing like a drunken Keynesian (a good thing, in her book). And she does have a point. The left made a great error when they attacked Osborne for cruel, fast, deep cuts – he is shaving just 4pc from total government spending and giving himself eight years to do it. To give himself so much time. has had to borrow shedloads of money. As much as Alistair Darling planned to.

It seems the most exciting thing to come out of today’s Commons press gallery lunch with Danny Alexander was the Chief Secretary to the Treasury’s claim that George Osborne locks his fridge in the department. Mr Steerpike has never been afflicted by an attack of the munchies while lurking in that part of Whitehall but he had a quick word with a Treasury source, who informed him that the fridge in question is Danny’s fridge too, sitting right opposite his office and that it’s only locked at night (which makes Mr Steerpike wonder what Alexander was doing going through the Treasury larder at night when officials are so happy to

After spending so many years pointing out Gordon Brown’s tricks and deceits, I had hoped for a bit of a retirement when George Osborne took office. No such luck. The Chancellor seems to have learned too much from his old nemesis and seems unable to resist stretching the truth – sometimes until the elastic snaps. So it proved with yesterday’s EU negotiation. The Chancellor is blowing smoke, but it seems that the £1.7 billion bill has been halved automatically by the application of the UK rebate – in the same way that previous adjustments have been halved automatically by the UK rebate. Osborne’s achievement – a smaller, but genuine one – was to delay

So are Tory backbenchers happy with what George Osborne claims to have brought back from Europe after his talks on that £1.7 billion bill? While the government argues with the European Commission about what it has and hasn’t secured this afternoon, the Right of the Tory party have already been working out what they think. Some had set a very low limbo bar of £400 million, and Britain certainly will end up paying more than that. The first thing is that they’re naturally not happy with the idea that Britain is paying anything. The basic view of those in the No Turning Back and Cornerstone groups is that Osborne should

Ed Balls had two great lines of attack today at Treasury questions, but didn’t really manage to get any traction with either. He started his stint in the Chamber by trying once again to push the Chancellor on when the Treasury knew about the ‘surprise’ £1.7 billion EU bill, then moved on to the Conservatives’ failure to meet their net migration target. The first attack simply led to George Osborne saying this: ‘First of all, may I say that it is very good to see the shadow Chancellor in his place? We had heard disturbing rumours that there was going to be a shadow Cabinet reshuffle. We waited nervously by

Two things have stuck in Tory MPs’ minds from their away. The first, that painting of George Osborne. The second, Jim Messina’s presentation and his confidence that the Tories would win.   Messina managed Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election effort and last year, the Tories announced that they had signed him up to advise them. At the time, most people—including several senior Cabinet ministers—regarded it as a press release hire, a good way of tweaking Labour but not much more. But Messina has, perhaps prompted by his great rival from the Obama campaign David Axelrod joining up with Ed Miliband, got more involved in recent months. He was over for Tory

What’s next for David Cameron’s tussle with Brussels? The Prime Minister made clear yesterday that ‘we are not paying a sum anything like’ the £1.7 billion demanded by the European Commission last week, and now the focus is on how much he can get the bill reduced by. He will have to pay a bill, but to maintain credibility, the Prime Minister must end up paying something much smaller than the original demand. Next week George Osborne and other European finance ministers will hold emergency talks on the bill, and today Number 10 set out what the Chancellor plans to say at those talks. A Downing Street spokeswoman said: ‘What