George Osborne opposed the demotion of Michael Gove and wants him to take a central role in the Tories’ election campaign, according to his biographer.
David Cameron overruled the chancellor’s “preferences” when he reshuffled his ministers in the summer, Janan Ganesh wrote in an new edition of George Osborne: The Austerity Chancellor.
Mr Osborne has also handed over some of his duties as Mr Cameron’s de facto political secretary to Lynton Crosby, his biographer quoted a No 10 source as saying.
Those Tories who suspect that the chancellor and Mr Gove have formed a powerful axis to promote his leadership ambitions will note Ganesh’s claim that Mr Osborne wants him at the heart of the Tories’ election campaign.
A benefit of the former education secretary’s enforced move to chief whip is that the chancellor has “another whirring political mind to trade ideas with” at the heart of government, Ganesh said. “They and Cameron hope to form something of a hive mind in advance of the election campaign, so as to avoid the dissonance that marred the last one,” he wrote.
Advertisement
The increasing likelihood of another hung parliament after the election next year means that the chancellor believes that Mr Gove’s “ultimate political achievement” could be persuading Tory MPs to keep Mr Cameron in No 10, either at the head of another coalition or as a minority government.
Mr Osborne’s ambitions to replace Mr Cameron as prime minster are more nuanced than the Westminster caricature that has him in a “triangular war with Theresa May and Boris Johnson, his likely rivals, and using Michael Gove as a licensed agent, and using ministerial reshuffles to populate government with his placemen”. In fact, the chancellor wants only to “keep his options open and see what happens”.
Throughout Mr Cameron’s leadership he and Mr Osborne have always taken extreme care to avoid public argument, and the chancellor remains determined not to repeat the mistakes of Gordon Brown, Ganesh said.
Unlike Mr Brown, the current chancellor realises how great a leap it is from No 11 to No 10, according to the new edition of the biography. “The range of burdens is daunting, and he wonders whether he could bear them as Cameron does.”
Nevertheless, the book hints that the pair operate less closely than they once did, although the author, a Financial Times journalist, suggested a “subtle increase” in the chancellor’s “deference” to Mr Cameron. He quoted a No 10 insider as saying: “To take one example, he calls him David to his face but always Cameron when he is talking to other people, even his own staff. ‘That was Cameron on the phone.’ It always used to be David.”
Advertisement
The appointment of Mr Crosby as the Tories’ election supremo was overseen by Mr Osborne, claimed Ganesh, and the arrival of the Australian has coincided with a reduction of the chancellor’s work in No 10.
“One long-time fixture of the No 10 operation says Crosby has assumed some of the ‘chief of staff work’ that Osborne used to perform,” according to the book. “ ‘George does less politics these days,’ he says. ‘Nobody calls him the part-time chancellor any more.’ ”