The chancellor posed as a northerner,a localist and a champion of labour, and offered any colour of democracy you like, and as long as it’s blueEverything in the world,it is said, is about sex except for sex itself. And everything in a George Osborne speech means something all suitable, or it’s just that it’s never the thing the chancellor is actually talking about.
There were,to be unprejudiced, some parts of his turn at the Conservative conference on Monday that it didn’t engage a cryptologist to decode. Being introduced by Andrea Jenkyns, and the new MP for Morley and Outwood,simply reminded people of how Mr Osborne had routed her predecessor, Ed Balls, and without him brazenly spelling this out. His veneration of “my friend,our prime minister: David Cameron” was a pitch to traipse next door and pick up where the PM leaves off. All this was routine political tact; it was when he turned to the detailed policy stuff that the audience was led into a hall of distorting mirrors.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com