Why We Haven't Seen the Last of George Osborne

There's a Monty Python cartoon in which a city is shown ravaged by a plague of killer cars, lurking behind trees and in alleyways, lying in wait to crush dawdling pedestrians. The city is only saved from this menace by the arrival of a giant cat that chases off the cars – only to begin destroying everything around it in an even more comprehensive way. Finally, the cat is killed by a giant hand, which then proceeds to crush all the citizens who flock to thank it.

In a way, this sketch captures perfectly the pattern of recent political events in the UK: we only get to see our enemies vanquished, when a still greater evil arrives to ravish us.

It happened when New Labour transitioned to the austerity of the coalition years; it happened when the hated worm Nick Clegg was ousted, only by an unexpected Tory majority; and it happened last summer, when Cameron and Osborne were finally defeated, by a still worse faction of the Tories.

Cameron, always the less dynamic of the two – Pinky to Osborne's Brain – shuffled off his political coil almost immediately: as if bursting himself, giant pork balloon, open on a spike jutting out from that podium outside Downing Street, directly after conceding defeat over Brexit. Osborne, however, has seemed determine to linger: despised, disgraced, fired from the cabinet, he nevertheless remains a prominent public figure, especially in his new role as editor of the Evening Standard.

WATCH: Should George Osborne Be the Editor of the Evening Standard?

It was perhaps a welcome development, then, to hear that Osborne will not be standing for re-election on the 8th of June. One nightmare vision I've had recently is that, once Brexit has proved a disaster, Osborne will emerge to lead the "liberal" faction of the Tory party to victory over May's "kill 'em all" true-believers, gurgling enough pleasant cooing noises about rights and internationalism to fool mainstream political journalists, all the better to have them applaud when he successfully delivers his party's plans to turn Britain (or, let's face it, by this point: England) into the world's largest tax haven.

If he really is gone, if he really is dead, then political obituaries will most likely remember Osborne in one of two ways. On the one hand, he will be remembered as a bungling, blisteringly incompetent chancellor, who presided over more needless economic torture than any other individual in recent British history. On the other, he will be remembered as a brilliant Machiavellian political operator: who was always able to get one-up over his opponents despite being, you know, incredibly bad at his job (political journalists always seemed to have a particular respect for this quality in Osborne: marvelling as they always do at the appearance, and not caring a jot about the essence).

In truth, however, both of these assessments would miss the point somewhat. Osborne was only very bad at being chancellor if we assume that the job of chancellor is to increase prosperity. But that would be a bit like assuming that the job of a rampaging barbarian horde is to increase crop yields. Under neoliberalism, the economy isn't meant to deliver prosperity: the market is a disciplinary tool, weaponised by the state to delivery conformity among the citizenry. Once the role is understood in this way, it becomes clear that Osborne was a chancellor of rare talent: "austerity" a brilliant innovation that allowed him to inflict as much pain as possible on the premise that it was necessary to cut all "unnecessary" spending in order for things to get better in the future.

Brexit, of course, is often understood to constitute a rejection of austerity, of Osborne's economics. But in truth, Cameron and Osborne's only mistake was to underestimate the British public's lust for punishment. (It's not that people don't want to be happy, but we're like medieval ascetics wearing hair shirts, their skin itching all the time for their sins. The happiness only comes after we die.) What else does Brexit represent, after all, than the extension of austerity's logic beyond the marketplace, into England's blood and soil? Once England has drawn itself back from the world, the Brexiteers claim – once there are no more immigrants nor even any provinces to bother our sceptred land – then the time will be right for us to stride back confidently onto the world stage. Brexit is the austerity of the imagination.

Osborne was great at utilising this ascetic logic for his own ends. Until, I suppose, he wasn't. And then Theresa May turned out to be the real master.

He's probably not done yet, though. In truth, Osborne's resignation as an MP most likely represents little more than the end of the first act of his political career. "I am stepping down from the House of Commons – for now," is the pregnant language he's chosen for his resignation statement. Out of parliament, Osborne can start to function for the Tories as a David Miliband-style king under the mountain: whenever great crisis threatens his faction of the party, Osborne's loyalists will assume he is ready to awaken, sally forth, stand in a by-election somewhere, sweep to victory.

If nothing else: surely Osborne's editorship of the Evening Standard makes him ideally placed to run for London mayor? Best to hold the eulogy for now, I reckon: before we know it, George Osborne could be the first President of an independent London.

@HealthUntoDeath

Related:

Why George Osborne Is the Perfect Editor for the Evening Standard

The British Dream: Oh, Snap!