The World

George Osborne, the Tories’s shadow chancellor, is in the sights of Gordon Brown and the Labour government. Young, (he’s not yet forty), affluent, inexperienced and smooth he looks like a tempting target – particularly in the middle of a deep recession. If Labour can paint Osborne as remote, callow and out-of-touch with ordinary people, they might yet score some hits. They have already found a useful, if infantile, nickname for him – “Boy George”, after an androgynous pop star of the 1980s.

So Osborne’s speech to the Tory Party conference earlier today was a crucial moment. I was in the hall – and I thought he did well. The stance he took was of the firm “truth-teller”, levelling with the British people about the tough choices ahead. But he managed to package this with some crowd-pleasing measures – such as a promise that all government ministers will take a pay cut, and that no public servant will be paid more than the prime minister (about £175,000 a year, if I recall right.) That proposal might cause a few gulps at the BBC, whose director-general is paid over £800,000 a year. His promise to cut a third off the costs of running Whitehall, went down well – although I would guess it will be almost impossible to achieve.

Osborne’s argument was that the public sector should share the pain currently being felt by private business – the pay freezes, the pension problems and so on. He used the refrain “We’re all in this together” so frequently that I had a ghastly suspicion that he might want the crowd to chant it. Fortunately, they did not take the bate.

Reflecting on the speech later, I could see there were plenty of holes in it. I’m not sure how a promise to restore tax breaks for private pensions and to raise the level of the basic state pension fits in with his overall theme that Britain must cut savagely, to live wihtin its means. But it was an effective performance, and will have given no pleasure to Gordon Brown.