GO and GQ: What A W****r

I have never rated George Osborne as Chancellor or shadow chancellor. A donkey with a blue rosette could have come up with the (broken) pledge to scrap inheritance tax that supposedly stopped Brown calling a snap election all those years ago. The vacuous prior pledge to share the proceeds of growth only lent itself to the Paxmanic "what if there is no growth?" Here and now, as John Redwood's talents remain wasted on the backbenches, there is something not quite right about a multi-millionaire trust fund beneficiary without tangible experience of wealth creation or preservation being in charge of the nation's purse strings, especially when his enthusiasm for decarbonising the economy continues to wreak havoc on fuel and energy prices. We can look back to the days of financial giants such as Howe and Lawson, and indeed to some extent Lamont (remember he took us out of the ERM), and despair when comparing the present day.

And would Howe, Lawson, Lamont or Redwood have gone to a GQ awards ceremony and told smutty jokes that demeaned one of the great offices of state? Not in a thousand years. But of course Osborne is the PM's mate. Which is evidently all that matters nowadays. We could even think of a comparison with the Blair reaction to the Prescott jab - "George is George". How sad.