No sleepless nights over austerity for happy-go-lucky George

George Osborne has never been happier. It said so on the front of The Times not so long ago, the source of the quotation being George Osborne himself. New baby, new wife-to-be, new ten-million-pound house in Notting Hill, and countless seven-figure jobs doling out the kind of strategic wisdom that was not quite enough to prevent him and David Cameron from taking their country out of the EU by accident – but that’s someone else’s problem now.

It was his turn, on Tuesday to tell the Covid inquiry what David Cameron had told them on Monday. That none of it was his fault. That, if anything, people should be lining up to thank him for austerity and the world of possibilities it would later open up.

What’s especially intriguing about Osborne is he hasn’t reached the same conclusion as his former boss, namely that the world would like to see as little of him as possible. In a private meeting in 2015, George Osborne is understood to have told David Cameron that having a referendum on membership of the European Union was a terrible idea, which in the years since, appears to have, as far as he is concerned, unburdened him of the same requirement of contrition.

No, Osborne is very much loving life. And it’s not just the new house, the new wife, the kid and the many new jobs. On this evidence, the thing that makes him the happiest of all is his having come up with some paper-thin analysis of his own actions that prove, at least to him, that none of the many things that have gone so hopelessly wrong is anything to do with him.

The Covid inquiry had the same questions for him as it did for David Cameron. Did the decimating of budgets, the cruelty of austerity, the deliberate targeting of the cruellest cuts in the areas that were already the most impoverished, in any way have an impact on the preparedness of the country to deal with a once-in-a-century pandemic a few years later?

And guess what? The answer, yet again, is: “No.” Not that it’s got anything to do with Covid. Osborne thinks the same as Cameron.

“Reducing the deficit and placing debt as a percentage of GDP on a downward path was essential to rebuild fiscal space to provide scope to respond to future economic shocks,” Mr Osborne said.

“I have no doubt that taking those steps to repair the UK’s public finances in the years following the financial crisis of 2008-09 had a material and positive effect on the UK’s ability to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic.”

Well, it’s good that Mr Osborne has no doubts. Other people, though, do have doubts. There are doubts to be found absolutely everywhere, with regard to what Osborne regards as an unassailable truth – that there were no better ways to restore the economy after the financial crisis than through massive public spending cuts that ruined lives.

There is a whole other school of thought to be found out there. The one about governments borrowing money when interest rates drop to 0.5 per cent and stay there for 15 years, and using it to rebuild the economy. That there were more effective ways to bring the economy back to health, ones that could have involved checking in on the pandemic stockpile rather than letting it expire into obsolescence (to be restocked by Matt Hancock’s barman).

In that one, you’ll also find various doctors’ unions, who’ve also given evidence to the inquiry about how austerity left the NHS woefully unprepared to cope with Covid.

Lady Hallett and her team will have to weigh those things up.

There was, of course, no public inquiry into austerity. No judges ever assessed whether maybe, just maybe, George Osborne might, for whatever reason, be quite a generous judge of his own performance.

So that particular part of the Covid inquiry will make for especially interesting reading, about five years from now. Though one doubts whether Osborne will have too many sleepless nights in the meantime.