From George Osborne:
Dennis Skinner asks him to tell the Royal Family that they won’t be getting a penny of the £7 million increase in the Civil List that they are asking for.
“We will be making an announcement on the Civil List in due course,” Mr Osborne replies. “But if the Honourable Member is looking for cost savings perhaps early retirement is something he could consider.”
LOL
AJ
It’s like an a capella rendering of purgatory, performed entirely by the public sector.
The strained falsetto is achieved by clasping their bollocks between two housebricks.
Splendid. Next.
Oh – here are some tools you may find useful, George:
Glad to be of service.
AJ
I’ve just watched Osborne deliver an address to the CBI (BBC iPlayer, look it up).
He seems to have forgotten that the election is over and that a whole other conversation is necessary where the business community is concerned.
Now to style.
Whatever merits George Gideon Oliver Osborne may possess, I can safely say one thing:
George Osborne is no orator.
The guy can’t parse a script (or notes) in order to get the tone and meter right. That the meter and emphases were so badly fumbled makes me think it must have been a script.
I wanted to be impressed, but his performance reminded me of myself trying to speak publically, aged 25, with ZERO preparation.
I had two problems back in those days. First was lack of confidence.
Confidence? George, you’ve just won an election. You are the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The pasty new hope. You should be walking into the room with your balls swinging. WTF is wrong?
Second problem was lack of preparation. When I was 25, I didn’t see the need to prepare until I’d fallen on my face a couple of times. Silly really; I’d heard the maxim “Fail to prepare, prepare to fail” many times in my youth.
If I need to deliver someone else’s message, even if it’s my message packaged by someone else, I need to read it and internalise it. George manifestly failed to do this.
Perhaps he deserves a break. He’s been busy.
AJ
To borrow first from the Clown and his unwitting contributor:
I rarely agree with the Eventard, but he’s spot on here:
But, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it’s going to happen. Mandelson & Co have just been kicking the ball around within the centre circle in this pre-election period. There is no need for the “underdog” to peak early. Why should Labour make the running while the Tories keep exposing themselves with their muddled thinking?
Soon the phoney war will end and the deadly game of winning the election will begin. What the campaign will need is a game-changing moment that will inspire and engage the voters. The party that can provide this will win the election, no matter what the polls say at the present time.
The utterly useless, vacuous Tories haven’t got a fucking story to tell that anyone wants to hear. I can’t believe that they haven’t worked out that the cuntry is fucking sick of Labour, of nannying, of taxes, of bansturbation …
They could totally their chances everything by returning to small-state conservatism, but iDave has made it quite clear that he doesn’t believe in that. This is all going to come down to a decision between two sets of appalling, amoral, unprincipled, mendacious cunts.
Fuck ’em. I really, really want them both to lose.
And then to Labourlist’s 2minute round-up of the Chancellors’ debate, which I thought was fair enough.
It’s a surprise and a shame no more was made of George’s assertion that he has the support of two people we won’t have heard of (about 10 mins into the actual programme).
There seems to be a consensus emerging that Osbonio did quite well. I thought he was appalling. Pusillanimous, condescending, soulless, unconvincing, anodyne and weak.
Meanwhile, I’ll leave commentary on Vince Cable to the Daily Mash.
IF the answer to Britain’s economic problems is Vince Cable then what are the schools like in the Dordogne, it was claimed last night
And the DibLems have got a viral video out now, which is actually not bad:
AJ
UPDATE: Mr Eugenides deals effectively with the Cable.
Al Jahom's Final Word 