Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world … So much in politics is a matter of timing and, on Tuesday, George Osborne found himself for the first time in several years staring at a slot machine that hadn’t come up three cherries. Treasury questions on the very morning after the House of Lords had given his cuts to tax credits a kicking was the kind of luck a chancellor could have done without. Especially as it could so easily have been avoided by someone in the Treasury getting their sums right in the first place.
George didn’t look as if he had slept at all well the night before. He looked a great deal more pallid than usual, something never previously considered possible, tight-lipped and furious. A man spoiling for a fight with someone. Anyone. Even the massed ranks of Tory MPs who had come along to the chamber to show their support looked nervous of getting on the wrong side of him. Some Conservatives were clearly persona non grata. Heidi Allen, who used her maiden speech to attack the chancellor’s tax credit cuts, was absent, though her echoes of pain from inside the whips’ office were audible.
Tory after Tory stood up to congratulate the chancellor on his financial management and air their heartbreak at the way in which the Lords had let him down. The very idea that an unelected chamber should dare to do more to protect the most vulnerable members of society than the government was simply too much to contemplate. If an irony bypass is one of the necessary qualifications for an ambitious backbencher, then Victoria Atkins showed she was made of the right stuff by reminding everyone that some of the main beneficiaries of tax credits were those on an income of £60,000. Step forward Baroness Atkins of Panglossia. If David Cameron does decide to stack the Lords with Tory peers, then she could be first in line.
More surprising was Andrew Tyrie, the chair of the Treasury select committee. Last Thursday he had made a point of ticking off the chancellor for having repeatedly failed to provide costings for the transitional effects of cuts to tax credits, but this small – if important – detail seemed now to have escaped his memory.
Rather, he went out of his way to grovel to the chancellor, praising him for his overall brilliance and expressing his amazement at the behaviour of the Lords. Such revolutionary fervour is rarely heard on the government benches. George grunted, but Tyrie has clearly not been entirely forgiven. Desperate to get back in favour, he passed the chancellor a note. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I won’t do it again, I promise.” George didn’t reply.
For all the Tory lovebombing, George knew there was no escaping a kicking from the equally packed opposition benches. The Commons enjoys a good bloodletting and even Jeremy Corbyn made an unscheduled appearance. Normally it’s him who gets the kicking and it was a rare treat to observe it happening to someone else. And a kicking is what George got as various Labour MPs sought reassurances that families in their own constituencies weren’t going to receive “Christmas letters” (Lady Hollis TM) giving them directions to the nearest food bank.
Neither did the shadow chancellor pass up the opportunity to get in on the act in his first Treasury questions. “Given what happened in the other place last night,” he said in his quietest, most reasonable voice – a tone infinitely more scary than his more familiar rant mode - “may I reassure the chancellor that if he brings forward proposals to reverse the cuts to tax credits, fairly and in full, he will not be attacked by opposition members?”
George did his best not to give ground. Transitional payments had always been part of the plan. It was just that he hadn’t quite got around to working them out and what people needed to concentrate on was that he was right and they were wrong. The closest he came to losing his temper was when the SNP’s Stewart Hosie suggested the Lords’ vote had lengthened the odds on the chancellor becoming the next Tory party leader. That’s one personal credit cut George really doesn’t want.
By the time the questions had moved on to steel closures, George began to relax. There was even the hint of a smile. Like most Tories, he had been astonished to discover there were still some steel works open, but that was an issue he could leave in the less than capable hands of his chief secretary, Greg Hands. How long the smile would have lasted if he had stayed to hear the Speaker pronounce on the constitutionality of the Lords’ vote is another matter. Normally John Bercow is only to happy to give his opinion on absolutely everything but this, he said, was above his pay grade. And so, de facto, he declared the Lords’ vote to be entirely constitutional. The Revolution has begun. Now for the Terror.
