It has been a scary weekend. Ghouls and witches all over the place, a live coffin walking along the pavement at night, a spooky fog in the morning. But none of that was much of a worry. What’s really giving me a fright is the emergence of the pale chancellor.
In the old days of the coalition he used to hide in the shadows, but now he’s out in the daytime, bold as brass, same old smirking and taunting Commons style, but slimline, more loveable hairstyle, and with the bit between his teeth, doing whatever he fancies. And he’s hot favourite to be the next Tory prime minister. Has everyone forgotten what he did in the shady old days? That rather worrying holiday in Corfu, partying with Nathaniel Rothschild, Peter Mandelson and Oleg Deripaska? The Omnishambles 2012 budget and pasty tax, the booing at the Paralympics, the Bullingdon Club? Flipping his homes in the expenses scandal? And now reports that his family furnishing firm, Osborne and Little, has paid no UK corporation tax for seven years.
So how come everybody trusts him all of a sudden? I don’t. I try to believe that he cares about the less fortunate. I know he eats hamburgers in public, visits the workers in situ, wears a high-vis jacket and hard hat, just like them, but I suspect he’s pretending. Somebody must have told him that’s what the common people do, especially in the north, and that Greggs is a bakery; otherwise, how would he know?
Luckily, he can see what enrages the untermenschen by watching Corbyn, their hero, then he can nick his lefty ideas: introducing a living wage, opposing corporate tax-dodgers, and such like. So, can I warn everyone, that if you vote for Osborne, we may well be doomed. It’ll be goodbye NHS, BBC, industry, affordable homes, police and publicly funded care homes. The poor can die in their hovels or in piles outdoors. Outside London. But I hope I’m wrong, and that in his heart he really does empathise with all his subjects, even the sick, inadequate, poor, burdensome or cost-ineffective.