George osborne

George Osborne’s speech on Monday calling for huge cash bonuses not to be paid this year drew an angry response from those hoping to receive huge cash bonuses – and various City and business pressure groups. A few years ago I would have felt deeply uncomfortable with what Obsorne proposed, but because nearly every bank has drawn heavily on state support over the last year, I think politicians do have a right – even a responsibility – to offer firm guidance to the banks. The FT led the charge against Osborne with both a critical news story, gleefully dissected by Iain Martin, and a harsh leader. Today, the paper follows

Brace yourselves. According to the Guardian, Brown is about to sell himself as a Great Reformer: “Brown, the cabinet sources say, decided in the past few weeks to adopt a tougher pro-public sector reform stance, in order that his defence of the state in the face of recent attacks on big government by David Cameron does not become confused with complacency about the current performance of the public sector.” Despite the sensibleness of the reform argument, I can’t imagine that Brown will make much headway with this. For starters, he has that “Roadblock to Reform” label, and Labour’s patchy record on public service reform, hovering over him like the proverbial

One already hears grumblings from members of the Shadow Cabinet about how much power has been concentrated in Norman Shaw South, the suite of offices where Cameron and Osborne and their teams sit in Parliament. But judging by a report in The Times today the leadership is thinking about centralising power even more when in office. Jill Sherman writes that: ‘Cabinet ministers have traditionally had two special advisers with another 25 in Downing Street. But Mr Maude is said to be thinking of giving ministers one each, supplemented by a separate pool of advisers, who would be based at No 10. Only advisers from the central pool would be authorised

Just before David Cameron came on stage they played a video looking back at his four years in charge of the party. It concentrated on the modernising moments — the huskie hugging, the efforts to get more women into Parliament and the rest. When Cameron did these things, some critics mocked them, claimed that they showed he was all style and no substance. But today we saw what those moments have made possible. Cameron devoted his pre-election conference speech to a classic conservative message, that the big state is the problem. Crucially, this message is getting a hearing. It is not being dismissed as those ideological Tories banging on again.

Sifting through this morning’s papers, you’d say that it’s mission accomplished for George Osborne’s speech yesterday. The realigned Sun demonstrates how much it has got behind the Tories, by giving the Shadow Chancellor an absolutely glowing report (“the Shadow Chancellor came of age”). He also receives good-to-medium notices in the Times, the FT and the Independent, while the Guardian is more mixed, but hardly damning. In the Mail, Quentin Letts writes that “Yesterday the Boy became Boss George”. And so on and so on. You can see where they’re all coming from.  As I wrote yesterday, there’s much that was impressive in Osborne’s speech. But there were also some weaknesses

They stopped letting people into the conference hall for George Osborne’s speech long before the Shadow Chancellor took to the platform – it was packed, not even standing room.  There was certainly an anticipatory buzz among Tory supporters, particularly after some of the policy announcements trailed in the papers this morning.  One delegate assured me that “this is the speech when George will convince the nation that he’s the man to deal with Brown’s mess.”  Everyone seemed pretty breathless. So did he pull it off?  Well, my immediate response is “yes and no”.  Probably more “yes” than “no”.  There was much that was impressive in the speech.  Osborne touched on

Paul Waugh highlights a passage from Harriet Harman’s speech today: “Contrasting Labour’s record on equalities and feminism with that of the Tories, she said that David Cameron would extend foxhunting rights to everyone, while George Osborne would replace a SureStart in every community with ‘a lapdancing club in every community’.” Now, Paul reports that Harman’s people are saying the “lapdancing” bit is merely a “jokey reference to lapdancing club tickets distributed during last year’s Tory conference in Birmingham”.  But it seems to me that this is a particularly contrived and even nasty attempt to sully an opponent’s name.  I expect the Tories can expect more of this dubious treatment as

You would have got long odds on it in the 1990s, but Peter Mandelson is now a conference darling. His hugely hammy performance delighted the hall and earned him a prolonged standing ovation. Since he has returned to British politics, Mandelson has sought to deliver enough good lines to write his own story. He deliberately inverted Tony Blair’s quote about choosing the Labour party and rallied the audience by saying ‘If I can come back, we can come back.’ He flirted with conference before confirming that the car scrappage scheme would be extended before wrapping up with a string of attacks on the Tories and a declaration that “this election

You may not agree with the specifics, but one of the successes of the Lib Dem conference so far has been to shift the debate about our fiscal recovery from one wholly about spending cuts to one about tax changes too.  This is a necessary step.  For reasons which have been delved into by Danny Finkelstein, spending restraint alone won’t be enough to tackle Brown’s debt mountain.  There will have to be tax rises.  And, what’s more, they will have to be efficient and – as far as possible – fair. These points are made by Jackie Ashley in today’s Guardian, who argues that Labour should move as quickly as