George Osborne

George Osborne (born May 23, 1971, London, England) is a British Conservative Party politician who served as chancellor of the Exchequer in the cabinet of Prime Minister David Cameron (2010–16).

Osborne was the son of Sir Peter Osborne, 17th baronet of Ballintaylor, a cofounder of the upmarket fabric and wallpaper designer Osborne & Little. At age 13 he dropped his given name, Gideon, in favour of George (and added it officially to his name by deed poll), in what he subsequently described as a rare act of rebellion. Osborne was educated at St. Paul’s School, London, and Magdalen College, Oxford. In 1994 he joined the Conservative Research Department, which had served for many years as a kind of “nursery” for leading politicians. The following year he was appointed special adviser to Douglas Hogg, agriculture secretary in the then Conservative government.

In 1997 the Conservatives lost power and chose a new leader, William Hague, who hired Osborne as his political secretary. Osborne entered Parliament in 2001, and he was quickly seen as a rising star. Michael Howard, the party’s leader from 2003 to 2005, appointed Osborne to the shadow cabinet in 2004 and to the senior post of shadow chancellor in 2005. When Osborne’s friend Cameron was elected Conservative leader later that year, one of Cameron’s first acts was to confirm Osborne as shadow chancellor.

Together, Cameron and Osborne set about modernizing the Conservative Party, which had just lost its third consecutive general election. They wanted to rid the party of its right-wing image and its reputation for not caring about public services or people with average and below-average incomes. This meant modifying the party’s long-standing ambitions to cut taxes. Osborne promised to stick to the Labour government’s spending plans on health and education and to delay tax cuts until they could be afforded. In 2007 he did commit the party to reducing inheritance taxes, but this was to be offset by a levy on wealthy foreigners living in Britain.

When the global financial crisis erupted in 2008, Osborne led the Conservative attack on the Labour Party for having mismanaged Britain’s finances. Many people warmed to his message, while others disliked what they felt was his strident youthful arrogance. For a while, Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, regained their lead in the opinion polls as the team best able to run the British economy, but by the spring of 2009 Osborne and Cameron were once again ahead, despite being deliberately vague (because of the uncertain outlook for the economy) about what they would do if they came to power.

In the general election of 2010, Osborne easily won reelection to the House of Commons, and, when Cameron became prime minister at the head of a Conservative–Liberal Democratic coalition government on May 11, he appointed Osborne chancellor of the Exchequer, making him the youngest person to hold that office in more than 120 years. Part of the power-sharing agreement that resulted in the coalition government was a pledge to quickly arrive at a budget-reduction plan. In October Osborne introduced a five-year austerity plan that would reduce spending by more than 80 million pounds sterling. The plan included cuts to welfare entitlements, public-sector layoffs of up to 500,000 employees, and a stepped-up introduction of the raising of the age of pension entitlement from age 65 to 66. Osborne was again easily reelected to Parliament in 2015 and reappointed as chancellor by Cameron in his new majority government. Osborne was replaced as chancellor by Philip Hammond when Theresa May took over as prime minister in July 2016. In April 2017 Osborne announced that he would not stand for his seat in the House of Commons in the June 2017 snap election and that he had accepted a position as the editor of the London Evening Standard. He held that post until 2020, when he became the newspaper’s editor-in-chief.