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A biographer awestruck by his subject.

We are still awaiting a truly objective portrait of the Chancellor. Photograph: Getty Images

George Osborne: the Austerity Chancellor Janan Ganesh Biteback, 368pp, 20

Who is this book for? Is it for the general reader interested in Westminster politics or Janan Ganeshs friends in journalism and those aides and special advisers who work for George Osborne and David Cameron, the creative young brains the author praises so lavishly?

Some background first. Ganesh is the recently appointed, Conservative-sympathising political columnist of the Financial Times, which has the most intelligent politics and economics coverage of any British newspaper. The FT, since the financial crisis and the Great Recession, has turned right: its leader columns support the coalition governments deficit-reduction programme (even if its distinguished chief economics commentator, Martin Wolf, does not) and its chief leader writer is Jonathan Ford, an old Bullingdon Club friend of George Osborne. Philip Stephens, a respected Blairite commentator and sceptic of the government, is now far less prominent on the paper since the arrival of Ganesh, whose columns are well sourced and mostly worth seeking out. The trouble is that Ganesh is something of a miniaturist: he has mastered the column; long-form writing has proved a greater challenge altogether.

In his acknowledgements, he says that this is very much a book by a Financial Times and former Economist journalist. Whatever could he mean? Perhaps this is a new school: we are familiar with the Whig view of history if less so with the FT/Economist approach to biography. Evidently the young fellow is a pathfinder, clearing a way for all those who would follow him, and what a noble enterprise it is, for Osborne is indeed one of our most fascinating politicians and Ganesh is fascinated by and deeply admiring of the man he calls the austerity Chancellor especially of Osborne the Tory tactician and strategic thinker.

An assiduous networker and power-seeker, Osborne, from the moment he entered Conservative Central Office as a young Oxford graduate, seemed to know what he wanted from a career in politics and how, ruthlessly, to go about getting it. He insinuated himself at the centre of the web of power within the party and made himself indispensable by applying his strategic intelligence and talent for the game.

Osborne has an ability to read situations and people and respond and adapt accordingly; he knows who is, or could be, useful to him and who is not, and he learns from mistakes his own, colleagues and opponents, the partys quickly. He is, Ganesh says of his hero, a psychological seer and a perspicacious analyst of people, including himself. Later, he tells us that Osborne is hyper-conscious of the political utility of ideas. And how blessed he remains: He has been a Pauline, a Bullingdon boy and a Bilderberg panjandrum, but he now belongs to the most truly privileged elite: those who are happy in their work.

Like David Cameron, who is five years older but who was also marked out as a coming man no sooner than he had entered the Conservative Research Department, Osborne, the eldest son of a multimillionaire baronet, was fasttracked to becoming a special adviser and someone whose services the sitting prime minister, John Major, called upon. He possessed a searing ambition to be a person of consequence, Ganesh reports.

After this, Osborne made sure he was close to William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith throughout their troubled leaderships and went on painlessly to secure a safe parliamentary seat in Cheshire at the age of 30. After the 2005 general election defeat, Michael Howard, before stepping down as leader, promoted Osborne to the role of shadow chancellor. He was 33. He and Cameron were admirers of the way Tony Blair had seized the centre ground of British politics and remade his party through bold, rhetorical positioning and internal conflict. Together they would set about modernising the Conservative Party, as Blair had modernised Labour, and prepare it for government. But not in quite the way they hoped, as it turned out.

Read the original here:

George Osborne: the Austerity Chancellor – review