George osborne

Pfizer will almost certainly have to offer more than its second bid of £50 a share for rival drug giant AstraZeneca, but the American predator seems to be winning the game of spin so far. For a start, Pfizer chief Ian Read turns out to be a Scottish-born graduate of Imperial College London who has spent his entire career with the company. AstraZeneca, by contrast, is run by a Frenchman, Pascal Soriot, under a Swedish chairman, Leif Johansson, both parachuted in two years ago – reminders that Astra Zeneca is already a multinational with its research facilities divided between Cheshire and Sweden and less than 15 per cent of its

Treasury Questions today was rather formulaic. George Osborne spent a little while congratulating himself on today’s growth figures (only to be cut off by Bercow, who complained his answer was ‘far too long’), and loyal Tory MPs congratulated him too. Many of them chanted the phrase ‘long-term economic plan’. Some Labour MPs helped out by saying it too, which Osborne thanked them for. He has his own new phrase, which sounds a bit like a Backstreet Boys single: ‘Britain is coming back’. ‘Britain is coming back, alright,’ he (nearly) told MPs, before demanding that Labour congratulate him on the GDP figures. When it came to Ed Balls’ turn, he dispensed

Ever since the Cambridges touched down in Wellington two weeks ago, the Daily Mail has been running headline after headline about ‘gorgeous Prince George’. But there’s another George who caught my eye the other day. Is it just me, or is the Chancellor looking a bit, well… dishy these days? He seems to have undergone the kind of makeover normally reserved for wives of party leaders. You know the ones I mean. New hairdo, new makeup, new wardrobe, and suddenly a whole new person emerges. I said dishy… perhaps what I meant is ‘for a chancellor’. He isn’t quite up there in the Ryan Gosling or Brad Pitt stakes of course, but

The popular pastime for financial commentators this season is sticking pins in George Osborne. To those on the left who hate everything about him, to those on the right who think he should have used the fiscal crisis as an opportunity to slash state spending far more than he did, to those in the middle who prefer their politicians to be vacillating blunderers blown by fate, and thereby easier targets, this Chancellor is pretty bloody irritating. The UK is expected to be the G7’s fastest-growing economy this year, and Osborne’s doubters at the IMF have had to admit, in a mealy-mouthed way, that they were wrong to try to point

David Cameron and George Osborne managed to garner more attention for their infrastructure announcement (or re-announcement) today by organising their first joint appearance alone together in four years – and making sure the media were aware that this was the case. The pair haven’t appeared together in public for a while partly because they fear doing so would suggest to voters that the government was run by two chaps from very similar backgrounds; better to dilute it by pitching up with other ministers, hopefully with vaguely different backstories. But it is also quite impressive that the two men haven’t felt the need to do these joint appearances after questions about

My friend and critic Jonathan Portes obviously took exception to my remarks about Keynesianism having been disproven. His entertaining rebuttal claims to have exposed my misreading of data. That’s not quite how I see it. I agree with him that the appalling build-up of out-of-work benefits happened before 1997. The Tories badly miscalculated incapacity benefit; thinking it would be a one-off way to help those affected by deindustrialization. But, in fact, it created a welfare dependency trap, and the 1992 recession caught too many people in it. John Major had an excuse: a recession. Tony Blair had no such excuse. I wasn’t joking about a quarter of Liverpool and Glasgow

Sajid Javid is the new Culture Secretary. Javid has impressed as a junior minister at the Treasury. He has learnt the political ropes fast despite only becoming an MP in 2010 and having done very little in politics before that. Javid’s appointment will please modernisers and the right alike. The right will be pleased that this Eurosceptic, Thatcherite has made Cabinet. Modernisers will be pleased that the Tories have their first Muslim male Cabinet Minister. Javid comes with a back-story that is all too rare in British politics. He is the son of a bus driver and was the first person in his family to go to university. His father,

It’s unfashionable to talk about the battle for the centre ground these days. The fight to win political credibility is conducted through a new prism. Populists versus the establishment, centralisers versus decentralisers, radicals versus those in favour of shrinking the offer. But the fundamentals remain the same, and much of the hard-fought credibility that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown earned during Labour’s three General Election victories is now the target of sustained Tory fire. And my worry is that Labour’s not taking it seriously enough. The last Tory Government used to speak in strident, right wing terms. ‘Unemployment is a price worth paying’, ‘the homeless are what you step over

‘Full employment’ usually means the lowest achievable rate of unemployment — somewhere south of 5 per cent compared with 7.2 per cent today, or to put it in numbers, fewer than 1.5 million compared with 2.3 million last month. You might think it ought to be a target of every Chancellor of the Exchequer. Only Norman Lamont ever said otherwise in public, telling the House of Commons in 1991 that ‘rising unemployment and the recession have been the price that we have had to pay to get inflation down. That price is well worth paying.’ Now George Osborne has embraced the full employment target, taking a little more wind out of

While welcoming George Osborne’s emphasis this week on raising employment, I have some caveats about his target – to have the highest employment rate in the G7. This isn’t hugely challenging. Those in employment currently amount to 71.2 per cent of the UK population of working age, well ahead of Italy (55.5 per cent), France (64.1 per cent) and even the USA (67.4 per cent). Germany, at 73.5 per cent, is the current table-topper and the one Mr Osborne aims to overtake. Aggregates like this, though, are dodgy to interpret and are affected by differences in age cohort size and other factors. For example, the rising numbers of younger women

George Osborne’s commitment today that the Conservatives will fight for full employment in Britain is another way for the Chancellor to make an iconic gesture towards ‘blue collar’ voters who might still feel left behind by Britain’s recovery (he can find a useful guide on other things to do in the pages of today’s Sun). The first was a rise in the minimum wage, long fought over by Conservatives as a measure which could damage employment, but embraced by the Chancellor as a way of showing that the recovery is for the many, not just the few. Today’s commitment in the Chancellor’s speech – which was initially billed as Osborne