He was once tipped as the next prime minister. But now George Osborne has been reduced to venting his frustration by firing a machine gun in the jungles of Vietnam.
Footage shot by tourists shows the former chancellor of the exchequer firing the weapon, believed to be an M60 light machine gun, with the help of tour guides at a former Viet Cong base near Ho Chi Minh city.
It is a rare sighting of Osborne, who has stayed out of the public eye since being sacked from the cabinet when Theresa May succeeded David Cameron as prime minister after the EU referendum.
Tomorrow's front page: Osborne goes Rambo! #tomorrowspaperstoday https://t.co/vksVEOP2Sa pic.twitter.com/sDIy62rEWU
— Daily Mirror (@DailyMirror) August 18, 2016
The Daily Mirror obtained photos and videos of Osborne and his two children in Vietnam. One witness told the paper: “He really let rip. We were all having a bit of a laugh about it – that he was aiming at a picture of Boris Johnson or Theresa May.”
On Friday Osborne tweeted in response:
After all these years, I finally have a front page in the Daily Mirror worth keeping
— George Osborne (@George_Osborne) August 19, 2016
A second tourist described how Osborne had queued up to buy bullets costing about £1 each before heading for the largest machine gun available at the shooting range. “His son went down with him but when I went down with our kids, we were actually told they weren’t supposed to go on to the range,” the tourist said.
Osborne and his children were seen at the Củ Chi tunnels, a network of tunnels surrounding Ho Chi Minh city that is part tourist attraction and part memorial to the communist Viet Cong insurgents who fought against American occupation during the Vietnam war.
According to Lonely Planet, Củ Chi is a “place of pilgrimage for Vietnamese school children and Communist party cadres”, making it an unlikely destination for a man seen by some as the most radically rightwing finance minister in British history.
The extensive network of tunnels, which at its height stretched from what was then known as Saigon to the Cambodian border, were used by Viet Cong fighters as hiding places, weapons caches and even field hospitals and living quarters.
US commanders responded to the threat with chemical weapons such as gas and napalm, carpet bombing, and defoliation with the notorious herbicide Agent Orange. Now the site is preserved as a war memorial by the government of Vietnam.
