Tag: Power-Generation

European-Union, UK-Current-Affairs, UK-Politics

Are we heading inexorably towards a Great Boris Betrayal?

Misgivings that Boris Johnson, across several policy areas, is in the process of betraying many of the promises he made or implied in both his party leadership and general election campaigns, are growing

Note: longer and updated version of the article originally published at The Conservative Woman on Friday 16th October 2020

Straws in the wind?  Maybe.  An overdeveloped sense of cynicism and scepticism on my part, laced with premonition?  Perhaps.  But the past few months have given enough indications to justify misgivings that, on several pressing issues of contemporary policy, Prime Minister Boris Johnson is progressively abandoning the positions on which his General Election campaign was based, less than a year ago.

On immigration, both legal and illegal, election pledges are going significantly unfulfilled. Johnson has failed to withdraw Britain from the UN Global Migration Compact signed up to by Theresa May – a withdrawal which would surely have given us considerable leverage in our negotiations with the EU over our future relationship – and which I suggested in July 2019 should be one of the eight key tests by which we could judge whether as PM, Johnson would delight or disappoint us.

The promised ‘control’ of illegal cross-Channel migration and people-smuggling has not only not materialised, but numerically has worsened. Operationally, it has descended into farce; if deploying an Airbus Atlas A-300M transport to conduct low-level Channel surveillance patrols wasn’t a desperate enough ploy to try and convince a sceptical population that action was being taken, how about the idea of deploying nets to catch boats ferrying illegal migrants? [Applications from unemployed lepidopterists welcome, presumably.]

The points-based assessment system following the Australian model looks reasonably robust – if and when it ever goes into practice – but the legislation faces defeat in the overwhelmingly pro-Remain House of Lords. Meanwhile, attempts to deport illegal migrants and asylum-seekers whose claims have been rejected are regularly being thwarted by ‘liberal’-left open-borders activist human rights lawyers. Yet, in the EU negotiations, possible concessions over free movement and/or the continuing jurisdiction in Britain of the European Courts frequently pop up on the radar.      

If pre-election Boris was suspiciously susceptible to the blandishments of the eco-lobby, then post-election Boris appears in total thrall to the Green Blob. Scarcely a speech passes without some hyperbolic reference from Johnson to how Britain’s economic recovery from Covid19 will be built on a ‘Green’ energy investment and production bonanza, despite its so far unmitigated expense, its continuing reliance on fossil-fuel powered back-up to cope with the intermittency problem, and its still relatively low contribution to the total energy output.

Consider for one moment the Britain in prospect under the rolling Covid-19 lockdowns to which Johnson appears irrevocably committed, despite the increasingly powerful and widespread arguments for a different approach, less damaging to our economy and society.

Whole areas under virtual house arrest. Travel, especially aviation, severely restricted. Rising energy prices. An increasing role for the State in the economy, needing to be financed of course by higher taxes, especially enviro-taxes. Unemployment growing, and business collapsing.

Johnson and Hancock’s policy response to Covid, imposing serial lockdowns in slavish deference almost exclusively to the doom-merchants among the medico-scientific advice available to them – despite a growing body evidence favouring a different, less economically and societally damaging approach – is certainly killing ‘Business As Usual’ for many firms, and their employees.

Tell me how this doesn’t go a fair way towards meeting many of the strident demands of the hard Green-Left, anti-capitalist, eco-totalitarian Extinction Rebellion? And if so, why? Undue influence from the distaff side, perhaps, or……what?      

Johnson’s condescending assurance to newly Tory-voting electors in the Midlands and North, worried about losing their jobs in the developing economic fallout from lockdown, and apprehensive about whether they’ll be allowed to set their relatives at Christmas, that they’ll eventually be able to boil a kettle from ‘renewable’ energy – provided, of course, the wind is blowing hard enough (but NB, not too hard) at the time –  is unlikely to retain their loyalty. And who can blame them?            

The allegedly ‘libertarian’ Boris Johnson has not been much in evidence during 2020’s explosion of leftist Wokery at not only street, but also at political, institutional, media, cultural and academic, levels. He has been reticent, to say the least, in robustly defending free speech, and has largely refrained from unduly criticising egregious instances of corporate Wokeness.

Particularly unedifying was the image of him, bunkered and mute in Number Ten, while hard-Left Black Lives Matter / Antifa protestors violently trashed the Parliament Square statue of his supposed hero Churchill, Johnson finally emerging to comment only after the statue had had to be boarded up for its own protection. We appear to have elected a Prime Minister reluctant to defend our history and heritage when both are under (literally) physical assault.

On Brexit, in recent weeks my colleagues Adrian Hill and Tim Bradshaw over at The Conservative Woman  have done a sterling job of chronicling in detail the twists and turns of the tortuous negotiations with Brussels over Britain’s future relationship with the EU. To repeat many of their arguments would be superfluous, so that here I merely need to summarise and comment.

Despite Boris’ tough talk for public consumption, it’s been possible to detect potential harbingers of compromise and concession. While the EU’s, and Barnier’s, intransigence continues virtually unabated, there has been talk of the deadline being extended to ensure Britain doesn’t leave without a trade deal, within which it would be surprising if some concessions were not made.

Pressure for compromise and concession to ensure No-Deal continues to come from parts of the financial markets,  business sectors,  and lobby groups. Some of the direst security warnings of Project Fear are being dusted off and regurgitated. Meanwhile, the EU still insists on retaining enforcement powers in any UK trade deal, while rumours circulate that an accommodation will be reached on the continued jurisdiction, after the end of the Termination Period, of the ECJ on business regulation.

On fishing rights, if arguably not the most economically significant issue, then certainly the most politically totemic, can we be sure that a government seemingly powerless to stop rubber dinghies full of illegal migrants crossing the Channel has the determination to resist, whatever it takes, the threatened ongoing predation on our sovereign fishing grounds? The likelihood of compromise to avoid confrontation surely can’t be ruled out.

For a PM who prioritises being liked over being feared and respected, his record of resiling from previous commitments since last December’s election, and his evident susceptibility to pressure, cannot but produce apprehension that potentially damaging last-minute concessions will be made, purely to avoid No Deal.   

On relationships with our natural Anglosphere allies, Johnson has, according to The Times, ordered the No 10 team and key government departments to establish links with the Biden campaign team, citing private polling telling him that Trump is unlikely to be re-elected.

It isn’t hard to see where this could be going. Are they hoping to use the anti-Brexit and EU-favouring Biden’s hostility to a good US-UK trade deal as an excuse to make last-minute concessions to Brussels, and thus be ‘forced’ to concede a BRINO 2.0 that separates us much less from the EU?

On the other hand, if Trump does win, he’s unlikely to thank Johnson for cosying up to Biden in mid-campaign, and will be less inclined to give us a good US-UK trade deal. This, of course, can be also be used as the excuse for making last-minute concessions to Brussels and thus retaining a BRINO 2.0 that separates us much less from the EU.

All this will inevitably have electoral consequences. I warned about it on 7th October, but mainstream media commentators are now cottoning on to the prospect of Johnson’s Red Wall crumbling fast.

As Rachel Sylvester points out in The Times, backbench pressure from Tory MPs worried about retaining their seats is starting to crystallise. Johnson’s apparently cavalier attitude towards the travails his lockdowns risk inflicting on the North can only revive the tropes about the ‘Conservatives’ being solely a party for the affluent South, predicts Nick Cohen at The Spectator.

Seldom in modern political history can such a newly acquired electoral advantage have been so recklessly and needlessly squandered in so short a time. Whether it’s deliberate, accidental, or, as Mary Harrington argues persuasively over at UnHerd, Boris hasn’t recovered from Covid and, notwithstanding his colourful ‘I’m as fit as a butcher’s dog‘ metaphor, is actually suffering from Long-Covid, leaving us effectively leaderless, is a moot point.  

However,  I don’t believe Johnson cares overmuch about the potential electoral impact of all this on his party.  I suspect he’s discovered that,  in contrast to becoming PM, he doesn’t very much like actually being PM, because the job is too much like hard work, often involving having to choose that which he must judge is the least bad from several equally unpalatable and unpopular options.  

Boris, on the other hand, as the only just released new biography of him by Tom Bower reveals, is not so much fundamentally lazy as chronically ill-disciplined and temperamentally disinclined to immerse himself in details. It’s easy to conclude that his innate desire to be popular rather than respected makes him find the stimulus and hyperbole of campaigning in purple poetry infinitely more agreeable than the more humdrum yet far more complicated business of governing in grey prose.

Moreover, he’s allegedly already complaining to friends about money: that becoming PM has left him significantly short of the income he needs to meet his ongoing financial liabilities which are the consequences of his louche, priapic, chaotic personal life. He knows he can make considerably more money as an ex-PM and journalist than as an incumbent PM. Presumably, he’ll claim ‘family reasons’ or something similar at the opportune moment.

I sincerely hope I’m wrong. But I fear we are about to be royally shafted on Brexit, just as Johnson is currently doing on Covid, immigration, Woke-ery and Green-ery. Messing up Brexit could even be his crowning excuse, and his chosen route out.

UPDATE: On Friday morning, in a development as surprising as it was welcome, Johnson announced that, unless the EU fundamentally changed its previously intransigent and uncooperative negotiating approach, Britain would conclude there was no prospect of an acceptable deal being agreed, and would therefore trade on WTO terms with effect from 1st January 2021.

If he means it, and sees it through, then I’ll be happy to admit I was wrong on this point.

However, the worry is that, despite it undoubtedly being the right thing to do, it might not be a statement of irrevocable intent by Johnson, but merely another negotiating tactic by a PM who has already allowed three deadlines he set to over-run without consequence, to be eventually diluted or discarded if it persuaded Brussels to return to the negotiating table in a more amenable frame of mind.

However, the likelihood of that diminished somewhat on Friday evening, when it was reported that our chief negotiator David Frost had told the EU’s chief negotiator Michel Barnier not to even bother coming to London for more talks next week.

Former Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith asserted, in The Sun on Sunday 18th November, that ‘Boris isn’t bluffing‘; that he really will go through with his threat to abandon negotiations and go for WTO on 1st January 2021 unless the EU grants Britain the same comprehensive free trade deal that it granted Canada.

Well, we shall see; after all, Johnson has bluffed for much of his life. Let’s hope this time he isn’t, and really means it.

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Climate-Change, Media

The Not-So-Green Greta’s Ark

Both on the water and off it, Greta Thunberg’s attention-grabbing transatlantic voyage just ended has been nowhere near either so Green, or so altruistic, as it’s been trumpeted       

Note: Longer and updated version of the article originally published at The Conservative Woman on Tuesday 20th August 2019

On Wednesday, 14th August, in a blaze of unremittingly fawning publicity and uncritical adulation of which even Moses descending from Mount Sinai with the tablets bearing the Ten Commandments would have been envious,  the good ship Mazilia – or, as I prefer to call it in view of its quasi-religious mission, ‘Greta’s Ark’ – set sail from  Plymouth bound for New York, carrying no less a personage, if you believe the Green hype, than the Eco-Messiah and putative Saviour of the World, diminutive, pig-tailed teenage ‘climate activist’ Greta Thunberg.

Greta's Ark

There’s much about this stunt and its main protagonist to mock. But just for the purposes of this article, ignore for a moment both the appalling cynicism in egregiously exploiting a clearly troubled and vulnerable child to advance an eco-totalitarian political agenda, and the fact that very few us can whistle up a $4 million, 18-metre yacht from Prince Albert of Monaco at short notice, and then spend two weeks crossing the Atlantic to assuage our enviro-guilt, rather than catching a 7-hour flight.

And instead, consider just one question: 

Precisely how Green has been The Blessed Greta’s supposedly planet-saving maritime odyssey?

Initially, let’s hopefully forestall any potential criticism for mixing up the terminology. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a colourless, odourless 0.04% trace gas essential to all plant life on Earth. It’s also invisible – though that, apparently, has not stopped Greta’s mother, a well-known Left-‘Liberal’ activist called Malena Ernman, from claiming her daughter is actually able to see CO2 with the naked eye. Truly do the righteous have bestowed upon them gifts denied to the rest of us.

Carbon (C) on the other hand, is the predominant element in coal. Which is why the Green movement always uses the language of ‘carbon’-footprint or ‘carbon’-free, when they actually mean CO2. Because in the public mind, carbon is nasty black stuff, isn’t it, while wanting, on spurious scientific grounds, to reduce the Earth’s capacity for plant and crop growth perhaps isn’t a good look.

First, how did Greta actually get to Plymouth? On foot? By bike? On a magic carpet borne aloft by unicorns? Or perhaps, more prosaically, not by ‘carbon’-free means at all, but by using the same fossil-fuel powered transport that we’re enjoined to eschew on pain of eternal eco-damnation?

Next, Greta’s Ark required the assistance of other vessels to un-dock it and tow it out of Plymouth. Curiously, this was accomplished, not by several longboats manned by brawny matelots lustily belting out a traditional sea-shanty as they heaved away at the oars, but by a couple of RIBs. These may have electric engines, but ‘carbon’-free their production ain’t.

Let’s look at the supposedly ‘zero-emissions’, ‘carbon’-free yacht itself. It’s actually built of carbon fibre. (Remember, we sceptics aren’t the ones who started the misuse of scientific terminology for political effect). Now, the production process for building a carbon-fibre yacht is estimated to be around 14 times as energy-intensive, and thus in ‘carbon’, i.e., CO2, emissions, as that for building one of equivalent length in steel. Not only that: the epoxy resins used in Greta’s Ark’s construction are different and are all organic materials made from petroleum and significant amounts of natural gas.

Some intriguing revelations about the crewing arrangements emerged soon after departure. It turns out that the westbound crossing crew will be flying back from New York to Europe, while the replacement crew will be flying from Europe to New York for the eastbound return passage.

2019.08.16 Lomborg Greta's Ark crew flights

So that’s several transatlantic flights for Greta’s Ark westbound crew to return from New York, plus several more for its replacement eastbound crew to get to New York. I’m guessing those flights won’t be in Economy, either. So what’s their ‘carbon’-footprint? Why can’t she just fly to New York with her father? Or even address the United Nations via Skype? Not all that Green after all, evidently.

Even though this eco-boondoggle has its own website on which the yacht’s progress can be tracked, some of us prefer to use independent sources of information for verification. So it was some surprise to see that, last Friday, on the Marine Traffic website, it appeared that the yacht’s position had stopped being reported at 0132 BST on Thursday morning, a mere 9½ hours after leaving Plymouth, and still identifiably within the English Channel’s Western Approaches.

Greta Ark posn Marine Traffic Saturday 17-Aug-2019

Which at the time struck me as slightly odd: as did the fact that, as far as I know, there were no news broadcasts from the air filming the yacht at sea. Given the obsequious near-24/7 coverage pre-departure, wouldn’t one have expected at least Sky News and the BBC to have arranged that, when the yacht was still only about 1½ to 2 hours flying time at most from either Cornwall or Brittany?

Add up the ‘carbon’-intensive construction of the boat and the ‘carbon’-footprint of all those crew flights, and suddenly this venture doesn’t look anything like as Green as it’s cracked up to be. But in this grotesque inversion of the fable of The Emperor’s New Clothes, woe betide us if we say so.

It sheds an interesting light on making an immature 16 year-old with a problematic mental history the poster-girl for incipient eco-totalitarianism that Green-Left inclined adults – many of whom insist in a different context that 16 year-olds are mature young adults with well-formed political views who should have the right to vote – are in contrast saying of the 16 year-old Greta Thunberg: “She’s just a child! You can’t criticise her!” 

But this is to note only at basic level the effective weaponisation of Thunberg. Despite her history of cognitive, emotional and developmental disorders, her celebrity parents have encouraged the view that her mental health problems are owed to the world’s alleged environmental crises. In other words, if she has some kind of obsessive disorder, then it’s all our fault. It’s a valid question to ask, therefore, why those who have nominated her to speak have chosen to hide from criticism behind such a fragile figure.

Behind her is a well-connected and well-off family whose business is ‘climate change’, and, linked to them, is a rather more publicity-shy cabal of Green lobbyists, PR-hustlers, eco-academics, and a think-tank founded by a wealthy ex-minister in Sweden’s Social Democratic government with links to the country’s energy companies.

Along with investors and those energy companies, they are all preparing to profit from the biggest Green financial bonanza of government contracts in history: the greening of Western economies. And Thunberg, via her parents and whether they realise it or not, is the fortuitously discovered poster-girl, the face of, and vehicle for, their carefully-devised political and business strategy. 

For them, ‘saving the planet’ in effect means government contracts to print money by selling the rest of us extremely expensive energy. Thunberg is being used to ease the transition to a Green crony-corporatism of technocracy not democracy, and profit not redistribution, deploying Green-energy lobbyists employing populist tactics and a children’s crusade to bypass elected representatives.      

But the sacerdotal reverence with which this entire cynically exploitative eco-stunt has been and is being treated, and the invective heaped on those who dare challenge it, either on its own ostensible purposes or its underlying motives, is in many ways an ideal metaphor for how deep-Green ideology has now acquired all the characteristics of a, albeit post-Christian and secular, religious cult.

Like other pre-Enlightenment belief systems, it posits a prelapsarian state of grace, a pristine, innocent, nature-harmonious Rousseau-ean past which has been corrupted by modernity, industrialisation and capitalism, notwithstanding their having wrought in just 250 years an improvement in the human condition unprecedented in previous millennia.

It holds that the restoration of environmental equilibrium, the reversal of Man’s Fall from the Garden of Eden, requires, above all, sacrifice and submission to an elite, who will dispense indulgences  – in the form of ‘carbon’-credits – to the fallen, absolving them of their eco-sins, while intolerantly silencing and excommunicating the heretics.

Coincidentally, perhaps, from Salt Lake City, Utah, the true aims of the deep-Green ideology for which Thunberg is such a superficially compelling poster-child for the gullible have started to emerge.

There, this week, the United Nations is hosting its 68th “Civil Society Meeting” of some 5,000 attendees drawn from some 300+ NGOs and representatives from 80 countries – no qualms about ‘carbon’-footprints for them, obviously – currently busy devising strategies how to better promote and impose UN “sustainability goals” in their communities.

Or, in other words, radical Green policies to redistribute wealth and power from individuals, communities and national legislatures to un-elected, unaccountable and authoritarian global bodies. The strategies on the agenda include:

  • Banning all cars;
  • Reorganising the suburbs;
  • Equating single-family housing with white supremacy;
  • Ending private choice in home construction;
  • Building green “municipal” government housing;
  • Banning all fossil fuels;
  • Rationing energy;
  • Curtailing air travel;
  • Banning meat consumption;
  • Controlling population.

If the contradictions behind the Odyssey of Greta’s Ark help more people to see more clearly the true – not nature and planet conserving, but power, wealth and freedom grabbing and coercively redistributing destroying – aims of the simultaneously enviro-authoritarian and Green-corporatist ideology she’s being calculatedly exploited into promoting, then it may yet prove beneficial. Though mercifully not in the sinister way it’s intended to.

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Climate-Change

Flat-Earth Hour

The WWF’s fatuous Earth Hour is a marriage of cynical Green eco-propaganda with scientifically-illiterate virtue-signalling

Every year, it happens. Despite “climate change” justifiably figuring ever-lower in their major concerns reported by people in surveys around the world, every year it still happens.

wwf earth hour 2The World Wildlife Fund, today a wealthy mega-corporation with slick marketing, more concerned with promoting undemocratic one-world government to prevent enterprise-capitalism and free trade moving millions from poverty into prosperity than it is with saving pandas or polar bears – the latter of which are doing just fine, thank you, despite its relentless but mendacious climate-alarmism – enjoins the world to plunge itself into darkness for an hour, to “save the planet”.

This isn’t the place to launch into a detailed exposition of the numerous manifest flaws in the theory of catastrophic global warming being attributable solely to the mere 3% of atmospheric carbon-dioxide that results from all human activity. It would make this an article of 8,000 words rather than 800. But for the purposes of this article, just hold two thoughts in your mind. First, that despite the measured atmospheric concentration of CO2 having continued to rise, global average temperatures have been flat for nearly 19 years. And second, that the Earth’s historical record shows no significant CO2-temperature correlation anyway.

earth hour comp

But, even if you refuse to believe what logic should tell you, that you can no more “fight climate-change” that you can “fight” tomorrow morning’s sunrise: if you uncritically accept the Green orthodoxy: the point to realise about Earth Hour is that your gesture – because, make no mistake, that is what it is, not a “contribution” – will actually be futile.

Firstly, a pinprick one-hour interruption to the overwhelming majority of residential light use that occurs at night will have no emissions-reducing effects whatsoever, on anything. At night, most power stations run at the same capacity as during daytime peak demand periods, and produce electricity (and thus the same barely-measurable amount of greenhouse gas anyway), whether it is being used to create light or not. There is no way sufficiently economically- or technically-feasible to store this excess power produced at night  – which is why electricity generators sell off-peak power so cheaply to run our electric hot water systems at night, which function as virtual batteries. Hydro and gas-fired plants are responsive to fluctuating power demand: but others are not.

Secondly, in Britain, domestic household consumption accounts for only ~30% of overall energy use. Heating and hot water represent ~80% of that ~30%, while lighting accounts for a mere ~9% of it. In other words, under 2.7% of Britain’s energy consumption can be blamed on a recklessly eco-uncaring population “destroying the planet”, as the WWF would have you believe, by having lights switched on at night.

Thirdly, just consider the language used to justify a minusculely-effective measure that will achieve staggeringly little, if anything, apart from potentially more traffic accidents and crime. “Climate change is the most serious threat facing people and nature”, pontificates the WWF. You might, however, think that continued sluggish growth in the global economy, mass-migration from a Middle East mired in religious schism-induced turmoil, and the global threat from expansionist, violent-supremacist Islamist-Jihadism, are far more serious than a now 19 years-halted global average temperature rise of just ~0.8°C in 150 years as the Earth recovers from the nadir of the Little Ice Age.

North Korea good on climate change

Mind you, there is one place on Earth where deep-Green ideology’s eco-argument, flawed as it is, clearly resonates. As the satellite photograph shows, North Korea is the most enthusiastic observer of Earth Hour on the planet. So much so, in fact, that it’s observed every hour – every night. This is what the WWF wants us us to emulate.

If you really feel you’ll be making a contribution to saving Gaia by sitting in the dark or in candlelight for an hour this evening, repeating what, for thousands of years, people suffered out of dire necessity and lack of alternative, go ahead. But all you’ll be doing is unthinking, narcissistic virtue-signalling, telling yourself and your neighbours what a good and caring person you are, while simultaneously demonstrating both your scientific illiteracy and your gullibility to cynical Green eco-propaganda.

It’s nearly 140 years now since Thomas Edison patented the first modern light bulb. It allowed us to light our homes and our public spaces like never before. It’s a small but powerful symbol of man’s victory over what for aeons was a terrifying natural phenomenon: darkness, and its companion, the unknown. The WWF’s misguided war on light via its fatuous Flat-Earth Hour is a perfect metaphor for Green-environmentalism: it wants to return us to the Dark Ages.

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European-Union, UK-Current-Affairs, UK-Politics

The Incredible Shrinking Chancellor

Formerly seen – not least by himself – as a master strategist and astute political operator, George Osborne’s authority is eroding before our eyes

“Events, dear boy, events”, former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan is reputed to have replied when asked to predict the factor most likely to derail his political plans. He meant “the unexpected”: in modern political parlance, the “unknown unknowns” that can, and almost always do, erupt, unforeseen, seemingly out of nowhere, to blow the most carefully-crafted plans off course.

Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne could be forgiven for spending more time than usual ruefully recalling Macmillan’s remarks at the moment. Because, since the start of 2016, his plans for his own political advancement have been derailed spectacularly, to an extent which, on 1st January, he can surely scarcely have imagined. Yes, partly by some of those unknown unknowns: but, ironically, also by his own blunders. His stature and authority are crumbling astonishingly, virtually on a daily basis.

Osborne with shadesYet, contemplated from Osborne’s New Year’s Day breakfast table, 2016 must have looked satisfyingly promising. First, Budget Day on 16 March would give him the opportunity to continue the centre-leftwards tack started in his 2015 Autumn Statement, designed to capitalise politically on Corbynite Labour’s charge towards hard-Leftism, by hoovering up disaffected Blairites and Labour moderates into the Cameroon social-democracy-leaning Big Tent.

Second, David Cameron would round off his tour of European capitals pressing for EU reforms at the Brussels EU Heads of Government Summit over the weekend of 19-21 February. True, he’d return with only trifling and essentially cosmetic reforms. But, accompanied by some lurid Brexit-alarmism, a Cabinet united in campaigning for Remain, and a “helpful” media narrative, they should be just enough to persuade a risk-averse British electorate to vote to stay in the EU. Clearing the way for Cameron to resign in triumph as Prime Minister and Party Leader some time in 2017 or 2018, and leaving Osborne in pole position to see off any  challenge and ascend to No 10.

Except it hasn’t quite worked out like that. In fact, it’s rapidly going pear-shaped. “Events, dear boy, events”.

Take the EU “re-negotiation”. Yes, Cameron did indeed return from Brussels with a “reform” deal: but one of such abject and transparent paucity, ineffectiveness and unenforceability, that it had unravelled, and been both rightly exposed and excoriated for it, within 72 hours. And to such an extent that the Government’s official Remain campaign strategy adopted, almost from Day 1, what had been hoped would be the back-up strategy of Project Fear. Any plausible pretence that there is a “reformed” EU at all has been dropped. Brexit-scaremongering Project Fear, to all intents and purposes, is the  Remain campaign.            

Conservatives - Careers before countryThen, from Osborne’s point of view, came the bombshell. He must surely have reckoned that both Boris Johnson and Michael Gove would be reliably on side, fully signed up to the Government’s official position, as fellow-advocates for Britain staying in even the risibly non-“reformed” EU that was on offer: Boris because of his general pro-EU and internationalist outlook, including a desire to see Turkey in the EU, and Gove because of his personal loyalty to Cameron. Before the Brussels summit of 19-21 February, even this political cartoon was circulating: the Party heavy-hitters, including Boris and Gove, lined up, Dad’s Army style, in Captain Camwaring’s pro-EU Home Guard platoon.

Not any more. Because in fact, the opposite happened. Boris, after much public and private agonising, declared for Leave, and Gove, with what must be one of the finest personal statements to grace British politics for a very long time, did the same.

Those two “defections”, I suspect, rocked Osborne back on his heels: not just on account of their unexpectedness, but also because of their implications, both for the EU Referendum itself, and consequentially, for Osborne’s own political future. On the Leave campaign, to Boris’ public appeal is added Gove’s principled integrity and intellectual heft. They make the outcome of the Referendum far closer and far less predictable: that the Government and Remain could actually lose it, and that Leave could triumph in a vote for Brexit, really isn’t beyond the bounds of possibility.

If that happens, despite his bluster, Cameron would, politically, be Dead Man Walking: and given that their political ideologies and fortunes have been so inextricably linked for 25 years, that means Osborne would too. Even with a wafer-thin Remain win, Cameron’s credibility, and thus Osborne’s, will be seriously damaged: the latter’s, possibly fatally, with intra-Party talk already being that the next leader will almost certainly have to come from the Party’s pro-Brexit wing.

osborne looking grimNo wonder Osborne has suddenly seemed such diminished figure, thrown off balance, ever since. His prospects of following his planned and mapped-out route of a smooth ascent to No 10 in the wake of a benignly-departing David Cameron have suffered a severe blow: they may even be receding, a victim of Boris’ burgeoning popularity with Party members and activists since his ostentatious and publicity-maximising conversion to the Brexit cause.

And it gets worse. Because, intriguingly, in only the barely three weeks that have elapsed since the denouement of these events, a gaffe-prone Osborne has been either been caught out and had to retract hubristic claims, or forced to execute a sharp policy U-turn in an humiliating climb-down, or experienced an open challenge to his authority and rebellion from his own backbenchers, on no fewer than seven separate issues.

First, the Google tax deal. A clearly pleased-with-himself Osborne made extravagant claims for the £130 million agreement he had reached with Google, presumably on the calculation of reaping political capital from the vocal lobby opposed to any (entirely legal) tax-avoidance by multinationals. That soon unravelled, however, with the revelation that it covered a full 10 years of back taxes and amounted to an effective tax rate of only 3%, against the UK standard corporation tax rate of 20%. It concluded with scathing criticism of Osborne from his own backbenchers, both the Commons Public Accounts and Treasury Committees launching separate inquiries, and both Google and HMRC being asked to re-appear before them. Google, meanwhile, are reportedly furious with Osborne for making self-aggrandising claims which have given them additional poor publicity.

Second, the claims of extra tax revenue from the lower top rate. Osborne boasted  that an additional £8 billion in tax revenue had been generated from the reduction in the top rate of tax from 50% to 45%, attributing the entire amount to the rate change. Unfortunately for him, that was quickly challenged as “precarious” by none other than the Institute for Fiscal Studies, on the grounds that it ignored any deferment factor and was more a one-off gain than a systemically-permanent windfall. We have heard no more about it.

Third, the planned tax-raid on pensions. Osborne had been planning a very Gordon-Brownian stealth-tax: to abolish higher-rate tax relief on pensions, and lower the threshold at which money invested in a pension pot starts to attract high, almost penal, rates of tax. The entirely predictable backbench uproar duly ensued, with Osborne’s plans being rightly denounced as simultaneously both economically-incompetent – disincentivizing prudent retirement saving – and politically-inept – targeting a natural Tory electoral constituency. They have been dropped.

hinkley Point comp 2Fourth, Hinkley Point Nuclear Power Station. This was announced with much fanfare by Osborne on his September 2015 trade visit to China. The deal, was, though, subject to a £2 billion taxpayer guarantee to EDF, without which they would have struggled to secure project finance, and immediately attracted informed criticism because of its capital intensiveness and cost per MWh of output. It’s now emerged that the building cost has roughly trebled, the strike-price per MWh for its output has doubled, and the start date has been put back 8 years: all within 6 months. The calls for it to be scrapped as an expensive and uneconomic white elephant are growing.

G20 vs EU How Do They Cope via Julia H-BFifth, the G20 warning against Brexit. At Osborne’s initiative, the plan was for the G20 group of advanced economies to warn Britain against exit from the EU. That quickly collapsed, to widespread derision, when commentators pointed out the inconvenient fact that 16 of the 20 G20 countries are actually outside the EU, yet self-evidently still manage to be in the top 20 economies globally. Prompting the question: how could they then credibly warn Britain, the 5th largest, that it must be inside the EU to ensure its very survival? Silence.

Sixth, this week’s Sunday Trading liberalisation débacle. Despite being warned of the likelihood of both the SNP yet again ignoring their pledge not to vote in Westminster on what are devolved matters in Scotland, and an incipient Tory backbench rebellion, Osborne nevertheless determined to push the Bill through the Commons. When it became apparent that the SNP and Osborne’s own backbenchers would indeed carry out their threats, there was a ham-fisted attempt to water down the Bill’s provisions, culminating in an humiliating rebuff from the Speaker who refused to accept a related Motion.  SNP MPs duly supported Labour, the Tory rebels duly rebelled, and an embarrassing defeat for the Government, plus the loss of the liberalisation measures, was the outcome.

Seventh, another Tory backbench revolt, against another Osborne tax rise, this time on motor fuel duty. Despite 74% of the pump cost of a litre of diesel or petrol now comprising tax, Osborne, it appears, had planned to use next Wednesday’s Budget to increase the duty even further. Cue the now normal resistance movement, by up to 150 MPs, and the plans for a hike in the duty are reportedly being shelved.

These kinds of setbacks aren’t unprecedented: Osborne has had wobbles before. Think of the Pasty Tax in the 2012 Omnishambles Budget: a previous attempt to raise fuel duty with effect from January 2013 which similarly had to be abandoned on backbench pressure: and the tax-credits imbroglio of 2015, when an Osborne converted, we were told, to “listening mode” was equally forced into an embarrassing retreat.

osborne looking grim 2But Osborne’s present troubles look and feel different, quantitatively and qualitatively. Quantitatively, because they’ve been coming thick and fast – no fewer than seven, and in just three weeks, which, I’d venture to suggest, is unprecedented. Qualitatively, because they contain an element which hasn’t been present in earlier iterations – a ready willingness, particularly among Tory backbenchers, not merely to voice misgivings, but vocally and robustly to resist, rebel, criticise and take to the media to denounce the Chancellor’s proposals in no uncertain terms, both as economically-disadvantageous and politically-inept.

The latter charge being especially ironic, and wounding. Because Osborne is, above all else, a Political Chancellor, far too prone to seeing virtually every aspect of economic and fiscal stewardship through the prism of partisan political triangulation. The shameless stealing of Blairite clothing in the form of a National Living Wage (aka, arbitrarily raising the floor price of labour to employers by State diktat) is but the latest example.

Osborne has long been lauded – not least by himself – as a political master-strategist. But, in truth, his excessive concentration on it, to the detriment of his economic and fiscal stewardship, has had decidedly mixed results. He’s been allowed to get away with increasing the National Debt by more in five years than even that preposterous antithesis of fiscal rectitude, Gordon Brown, managed in thirteen, largely because, when only 6% of the population know the difference between deficit and debt, few votes were risked by it.

Yet being master-strategist for two elections, 2010’s not won, even against Brown, and 2015’s, not expected to be won, but won mainly out of voters’ fear of a Labour-SNP government, tell a different story. As does the prevalence of the “austerity” narrative, despite the lamentable pace of deficit reduction. During the 2010-2015 Coalition, the overall rate of public spending reduction was a miserable 0.4% pa in real terms: supposed political master-strategist Osborne, however, succeeded in being portrayed as the heartless architect of Victorian-workhouse austerity, for the macro-fiscal equivalent of reducing a weekly £200 shopping bill by 80p.

So the last month’s acceleration in the decline of Osborne’s standing is partly an overdue reckoning: but its litany of serial hubris, politico-economic miscalculation, U-turn and climb-down, in just 20-odd days since the shock of Boris’ & Gove’s defection to the Brexit cause, have notably exacerbated its visibility. The wider appreciation of his Brown-like inveterate political-meddling and fiscal neo-Keynesianism, stealth-taxes and all, mean that the “Osbrowneomics” and “Osbrowne” memes are gaining wider currency.

osborne looking hauntedAs each successive Tory backbench anti-Osborne rebellion yields results, his critics are becoming more emboldened. They’re getting a taste for it, scenting blood. Osborne suddenly looks at bay, haunted, error-prone, wan, vulnerable, yesterday’s future, a fast-diminishing figure, in a way few can have predicted on 1st January.

He really is The Incredible Shrinking Chancellor, his stature and authority crumbling daily before our eyes.

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