Tag: “George Osborne”

No, no, no Prime Minister … that media blitz yesterday was not the thing to do. I mean they were perfectly nice pictures, jacket off in the Today programme studio, striding red box in hand around Number 10, hitting said red box on train, factory visit, sit down with Nick Robinson in nice industrial setting, [...]

If, as is being widely suggested, Francois Hollande wins the French elections, and Nicolas Sarkozy becomes a rare, single-term President, there are one or two lessons David Cameron might try to draw on … once he has repaired the damage done to Anglo-French relations by effectively endorsing Sarko. The main lesson relates to hyperactivity. When [...]

It was on April 1 (apologies for inability to cut and paste links on the iPad but nobody has taught me yet!) that I suggested we should ‘watch out for a backlash on charitable and philanthropic giving.’ At the time, the debate was focusing on pasties and the so-called granny tax, but it was a [...]

Even accepting that the media’s shift to a more negative take on the government is in part dictated by David Cameron’s decision to set up the Leveson Inquiry, he would be wise not to dismiss the change as an act of revenge pure and simple. Because in many ways I believe the media, which has [...]

I resisted the many requests from Sunday newspapers to offer crisis comms advice to Number 10 as a combination of granny tax, tax cuts for the rich, pasties, petrol panic and a Tory funding scandal combine to give the government a fairly choppy period. Partly this was because I remember once spotting Bernard Ingham, Maggie’s [...]

If the frontbench had accepted Ed Miliband’s invitation to raise their hands if they were going to be better off as a result of the Budget, we’d have seen an awful lot of fingers in the air. I understand why instead they squirmed and, in George Osborne’s case, sank a little deeper into the green [...]

I am due to be sitting on the This Week sofa with Michael Portillo on Thursday, when doubtless post-Budget discussion will dominate. As regular viewers will know, the show kicks off with Andrew Neil asking Michael and his fellow close-up sofa-occupant for their ‘moment of the week’. This week’s will probably emerge from tomorrow, but [...]

Half way through George Osborne’s BBC interview with Andrew Marr yesterday, I got a bit bored and tweeted that there seemed little purpose to the interview other than to remind people of two things we already know – that we have a coalition government, and that the Budget is on Wednesday. This was, I now [...]

Am rushing out in a minute but just wanted to post an extract from this morning’s Labour Party media monitoring brief, which they still kindly send me by email every morning. It is self-explanatory. And just because one of the ‘business chiefs’ in the headline is a banker, and a RBS banker to boot, doesn’t [...]

I got in last night to catch sight of Nick Clegg talking about child benefit on the news. Now I didn’t see the start of the report, but if I read the words and body language right, I thought that rather than agitating as the Lib Dem leader in advance of the Budget, he was [...]