Reasonableness versus crockery-smashing
George Osborne rubbished the previous witness, Gordon Brown, as a “fantasist” for imagining some sort of Tory/News International conspiracy over BSkyB. How could there really have been a “cunning plan,” he mocked, to put Vince Cable in office at BIS, get him into trouble with a Telegraph sting, and then engineer his replacement by Jeremy Hunt?
That, to be fair to Gordon Brown, wasn’t quite what the former PM was saying. He was suggesting that there was a grand deal over all the rest of the 2009 News Corp/Murdoch shopping list and implying that the Tories and the Murdochs were so in bed together that the BSkyB bid slotted in later to that cosy relationship.
In general, George Osborne is, like virtually all the political witnesses there have been at this inquiry, keeping it low key and not setting fire to the furniture. If the political witnesses to Leveson divide into two schools of appraoch – the Blair and Brown schools, seminar/reasonableness school versus crockery-smashing/conviction school – George Osborne’s appearance belongs strongly in the former camp.
George Osborne told the Leveson inquiry that the blurring of the line between comment and fact in newspapers was probabaly too difficult to police – even though newspapers, under the PCC guidance, are meant to keep the two separated. His general remarks were the closest to the main newspapers’ own beliefs since Michael Gove gave his evidence. Maybe it will help to thaw some of the cooling coverage he’s been getting from some papers since the budget.
George Osborne revealed that he effectively signed up to Vince Cable’s view, caught when he was recorded talking to reporters posing as constituents in December 2010, that he had a nuclear option when it came to the Coalition – if he resigned, it might bring the Coalition down. Mr Osborne said that when the PM met with him and others on the day the story broke about Vince Cable’s recorded comments, the Chancellor said at that meeting he was “concerned about the Coalition and the unity of the government” if Vince Cable had to resign and he was keen to avoid that.
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