Poor George Osborne. He is a sort of anti-Groucho Marx. One cannot help but suspect he has spent his life desperately caring to belong to clubs that don't really want him as a member. That said, the unravelling of events this past week has been screamingly funny - if not quite A Night at the Opera, then certainly An Afternoon in Corfu. For weeks after he first leaked the story of Peter Mandelson's Greek island poison-dripping about Gordon Brown, the shadow chancellor had been disporting himself with the gravity-resistant cockiness of a cartoon character who has run over the edge of a cliff, but has yet to look down. That particular illusion has come to an abrupt end, and it is now Mandelson's turn to evoke the stuff of fiction, with his twinkly-eyed refusal to condemn Osborne, after that job has been done for him, more than a little redolent of Francis Urquhart's: "You might think that; I couldn't possibly comment." To class Osborne as socially out of his depth in all of this might seem odd: he has led a gilded life, after all. But reading this tale of yachts and billionaires and people who need not trouble themselves with anything so vulgar as democracy, he seems a mere parvenu, whose maladroit grasp of etiquette now threatens to destroy him. (I am somehow reminded of that other supposed big hitter, Sir Alex Ferguson, being devastatingly outmanoeuvred by the tycoons John Magnier and JP McManus over the racehorse Rock of Gibraltar, a row in which the Manchester United manager was made powerfully aware of the minuscule nature of the pond in which he was the big fish.) George's family are in wallpaper. Trade, I suppose you'd call it for a laugh, and though he wouldn't be required to use the back entrance - his father is the 17th baronet - there is much to suggest he has always been more Charles Ryder than Sebastian Flyte. At the Bullingdon Club he was known as Oik, on account of having gone to St Paul's as opposed to somewhere proper like Eton or Harrow. It's only surmise, but one suspects he was rather more often the Bullingdon's raggee than the ragger, with one such ragging a neat metaphor for what has been happening to him all week. The young Osborne was held upside down by his fellow members, who banged his head on the floor each time he failed to answer correctly the question: "What are you?" He got it eventually. The unexpurgated answer was: "I am a despicable cunt." Even in the newest Bullingdon photo to surface, Osborne looks gauche. There's something brittle and unconvincing to his swagger, tucked away downstage right in a made-up bow tie, while Nat Rothschild stares inscrutably out from the centre. Hand-tied bow tie, obviously. Much has been made of Rothschild's private nature, and he seems to have an instinctive grasp of how to turn any weaker personality traits - perhaps even catagelophobia, the fear of being ridiculed - to his advantage, cultivating an air of quiet steel, rather in the way that Charles Saatchi or Kate Moss have long traded on the intriguing power of saying nothing at all. Osborne has betrayed himself as the opposite - a blabbermouth who picked a fight with Mandelson on ground on which he was so compromised that a regional sales rep whose Vauxhall Astra glovebox contains a copy of The Art of War could tell you that defeat was inevitable. Even more staggering, for a chap who has known Rothschild since they were at prep school, was Osborne's inability to realise that leaking details of conversations that took place while he was enjoying Rothschild's hospitality would incense his host. Corfugate is primarily a tale of club rules broken. Not literal clubs, in most cases - though Bilderberg Group meetings have been mentioned - but the deck-shoed networks of the super-powerful, who sweetly allow politicians the illusion of being allowed to run things, and even to start the odd war, so long as they think it will bring down the price of oil. Most of the politicians ever allowed within a sniff of this world learn its mores, just as Mandelson has. They are pathetically grateful to be asked to Rupert Murdoch's annual retreats; they allow Murdoch's son-in-law Matthew Freud to buy them £34,000-worth of private jet travel, as Cameron did on this same Greek trip; and they don't do anything so vulgar as to mention in the register of members' interests that they had a meeting with Mr Murdoch while they were there. This is nothing new. John Campbell's brilliant biography of Margaret Thatcher chronicles forensically the manner in which Thatcher treated Murdoch as a powerful Reagan-like friend and ally, given free access to her, and invited several times to spend Christmas at Chequers. And yet, she never once mentioned Murdoch in her memoirs. Whatever goes on in the rarefied air above democracy will always be politicians' dirty little secret. If it wasn't such a dirty big one, that is. The only mystery is why we seem to restrict use of the word oligarch to Russians. Oleg Deripaska, the man Osborne allegedly solicitied for a donation, is described thusly, though not Mr Murdoch, or indeed Mr Freud. Let us end this reticence. What greater credit to our meritocracy, after all, than an erstwhile popstar press officer's rise to princemaker?Even a Bullingdon baronet can struggle in the rarefied air above democracy
Osborne's Corfugate error was to break the club rules of the powerful rich who, sweetly, let political types appear important
Sunday, 26 October 2008
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