Latest Essay: George Osborne
Latest List: Best British Prime Ministers

See also:

My London blog (photos and ramblings):
www.williamruby.blogspot.co.uk

My novel, Kindness is a City:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kindness-is-a-City-ebook/dp/B009N0DCY4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1359279700&sr=8-1


Latest Essay:

The Most Hateful Tory: George Osborne

Let me assert from the outset that I dislike Tories. I dislike the gimlet eyes and ragged teeth, the barely-thwarted misanthropy, the evangelistic devotion to an inherently flawed politico-economic construct of capitalism (with or without its oxymoronic 'caring face'), the shuffling discomfort in the company of foreign people and black people. A belief in the infallibility of the private sector (in some peoples' experience five blokes standing around a hole in high-visibility tabards while one bloke in a high-visibility tabard works in the hole) is as alarming as finding out that really very clever Rowan Williams actually seeks ineradicable truths from racially inaccurate plaster representations of rural Middle Eastern folk who don't even know they've become famous over the last two millennia.

And I do not mean to include all politically conservative or right-wing people in this diatribe, but rather the singular fusty beast called the English Conservative Party Member, in particular that rare breed generous enough with their time to rise to the level of Cabinet Minister and heal the nation. I rather like, or liked: Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, Gore Vidal. I enjoyed the late-flowering of Christopher Hitchens' dalliance with the American Right, and I am fascinated by the right-wing voting habits of little Ronnie Corbett.

I do not like, have not liked, in fact I find hateful: Margaret Thatcher (possessed of a legendary personal charm that was carried to its death by the tsunami of her grotesque policies), Winston Churchill (the rampaging class war bully, not the so-called Saviour of a Nation), Cecil Parkinson (fop), Michael Howard (the personification of a vampire bat staring menacingly through your front windows), John Redwood (because of that Welsh national anthem horror show: political judgement sub-educational special needs), Robert Peel (started it all, him), Stanley Baldwin (fop), Anthony Eden (fop), Harold McMillan (exponent of gross misjudgement of the popular mood Sine Pare), Jeffrey Archer (where do we start?), Enoch Powell (racist fool), Nigel Lawson (privilege and oil somehow perfectly blended), Edwina Currie (spiteful, bedraggled usurper of the cuckolded Norma Major), Michael Gove (sinister drooling Pinocchio).......should I stop now?

They are, or were, awful, every one of them, stamping their England with an identity too easily recognised and derided around the world as Blimpish, haughty, reactionary and cold.

And yet they have a modern champion who has risen beyond them all—a conduit to the chastening Tory waters if you like, vaunted and corporeal, a golden calf of the Right, a man who embodies so many of their collective qualities in one turtle-eyed, moist-lipped, alabaster-skinned, big-bottomed package. None can match him.

Step forward Right Honourable Gideon George Oliver Osborne, BA, MP, Chancellor of the Exchequer.

You are TMHATO: The Most Hateful Tory.

Some facts about Gideon:

     • Gideon's first and only job outside politics involved typing the names of the dead into an NHS computer

     • He once folded towels (presumably sneeringly, and with a moist mouth) in Selfridges

     • He is godfather to Dave's kids

     • Dave is godfather to Gideon's kids

     • His 15% share of his father's Osborne and Little wallpaper company is estimated to be worth £4 million

     • His mother is called Felicity Loxton-Peacock. It is not known if she shops at Iceland.

   • He is descended from the Irish aristocracy—the 'Ascendency'—and heir to baronetcies in both County Tipperary and County Waterford

     • He edited The Bullingdon's own Isis magazine at Oxford whilst almost certainly throwing bread rolls around. This was a few years after Dave and Boris had thrown similar bread rolls around the same restaurants

     • He claimed £47 from the public purse for two copies of a DVD showing his own speech on 'Providing Value For Taxpayers' Money', part of a suggested (but never proven) £55,000 enjoyed in this way over some years before the expenses scandal broke

     • He has not paid £55,000 back into the public purse

     • George Osborne was a character in W. M. Thackeray's Vanity Fair. Gideon Osborne was not.

     • Gideon is married to a writer, The Hon Mrs Frances Osborne, née The Hon Frances Victoria Howell, daughter of former MP David Howell (and now Tory Peer, Baron Howell of Guildford). Her novel Park Lane features class-divided members of a substantial Mayfair household in suffragette-age London discovering that class is actually no divide really if you put your mind to it.

     • Gideon once 'passed the ice cube' to ginger pop Royalist Geri Halliwell during a game at a party. We cannot reveal how exactly the ice cube was passed, but we shudder anyway.

     • Ok, it's not a fact but most observers maintain that it was Gideon's indebtedness to discredited News of the World editor Andy Coulson for downplaying dominatrix Natalie Rowe's expose about Gideon, cocaine, and her, that landed that particularly discredited wordsmith the job of political adviser at Number Ten.

     • No investigation ever took place of Gideon's reported illegal request of a very large sum of money from a billionaire to back the latest Tory election campaign, in what came to be known as 'Yachtgate'

     • Gideon changed his first name to George because he didn't really like Gideon (and it's truly the best decision he ever made)

As an itemisation of Tory Evil, the above list might not seem particularly exceptional, certainly so in the context of the current cabal of salivating millionaire dogs that make up the Coalition cabinet. Indeed it is marginally innocuous—a bit of nepotism here, a dash of hypocrisy there, shaken not stirred with the silver spoon of privilege.

No where Gideon stands alone is, as it maybe should be, in politics and the personal delivery of those politics. He is the most political of Chancellors and—maybe because of it, maybe not—starting to look like the worst of Chancellors. It is not only his (apparently highly influential) ideological commitment to the never-quite-explained 'shrinking of the state' that appals those who are respectful and admiring of the state's long-standing central role in a liberal free nation like Britain, but the impression he manages to give in every appearance in the House, in every interview, in his every utterance, of a smug amusement at the idea of the state—which is not the public, but rather less than that; an idea millionaire Tories cannot seem to grasp--being shrunk and the public not liking it. Not only does his faintly autistic, limpet-like adherence to internationally discredited deficit (but not debt) reduction plans make one feel constantly slightly ill, but the smug and dismissive way in which he defends his continual failure to resuscitate the economy is a bitter pill indeed.

There has seldom been a politician who appears so much to think of politics and high office as an intellectual game. Thatcher was the polar opposite: a zealot to Gideon's smarmy Devil's advocate. The twenty thousand pounds-a-night public speaking appearances that will flow in after he is removed from office will be easily scripted; one fears that Gideon is already using his experience of playing with our lives to provide the grist for that particularly lucrative mill.

The City thinks Gideon inexperienced, over-promoted, self-satisfied. Its enemy the public does not demur. A son of Notting Hill—that most socially divided part of London--he is an urban Tory, and therefore intimately aware of how the spiralling inequality his government's policies are creating will have real impact on those who live just yards away from his childhood home, and in a way that his shire county colleagues simply cannot. He is vindictive then, and as empathy deficient as the highland Laird who watched impassively as his poorest neighbours were pushed to the sea.

David Beckham's early career grin was a shy, endearing defence. Am I alone in noticing that it has mutated into an over-rehearsed 'Here I Am Again!' rictus in more recent times? Gideon's smile never changes whatever the lie of the political land. Look again and spend some time with it. You will see what I see in the small, dark, intelligent eyes and in the pursing of those rather sensual Botticelli lips: some malevolence, great amusement barely held at bay, and the coldness that accompanies a life of effortless calculation.

William Ruby

Latest List:

Best British Prime Ministers (positive impact on the nation)

               Grey (Reform Act, abolition of slavery)

               Campbell-Bannerman (free trade, Irish Home Rule, free school meals, support of unions)

               Atlee (NHS, nationalisation of public utilities, state welfare, decolonisation)

               Pitt the Younger (facilitating the move from the ‘old’ to the’ new’ worlds without revolution)

               Churchill (but only for the war years, otherwise he was a nasty Tory reactionary)