When this author first read news of George Osborne’s impending editorship of the London Evening Standard, it felt like respite from the sordid world of everyday British politics. Osborne may have presided over six years of cruel and unusual and grossly politicised austerity, but at least – so went the thought as my eyes scanned the headline – he cannot stomach Brexit.
He may be an elitist and a narrow economist, but he is also in his own way globally-minded, one of the sternest critics of the Leave campaign, steadily rebuking Theresa May’s Brexit strategy from his place of exile on the backbenches, and a longtime friend of Israel and China. So perhaps he is not altogether intolerant; perhaps after all, he is a man of principle.
Leaving the parched ground of contemporary politics for the rarefied intellectual atmosphere of life at the Standard: Osborne might have found some virtue in that, not much, but at least a little. Because of course – so I presumed as my clicking finger hovered – in order to take up such a role, Osborne was waving a stiff-handed goodbye to his tenure as a Member of Parliament.
In fact nothing of the sort! Osborne intends to juggle his editorship with half a dozen other duties. Serving the people of Tatton and shuttling between his constituency and Westminster obviously comes easily to Osborne, for with time weighing heavily on his hands, he already supplements his £74,000 a year salary. There is his £650,000 advisory role to the United States asset manager BlackRock Investment Institute, a Kissinger Fellowship at the McCain Institute which furnishes him with a handy £120,000 stipend, while since his sacking as Chancellor last July, he has earned £800,000 in engagements for the Washington Speakers Bureau.
That’s all forgetting his chairmanship of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership – a sop to the north during David Cameron’s run as Prime Minister and a surreptitious attempt to get cities to agree to elected mayors, which Osborne has seized upon with renewed vigour, so he would have us believe, now that his other political responsibilities have dwindled.
Aside from raising concerns about time constraints, the level of commitment he is showing his Tatton constituents, and the endlessly revolving door between government and the private sector, Osborne’s editorship of the Standard seems like a brazen conflict of interest. How can a leading MP be expected to run London’s biggest local handout impartially? Osborne says the job will fill in his mornings, otherwise reserved for a spot of jogging, but his reach by some measure exceeds his meaty grasp.
