George Osborne – next Tory Mayor of London?

Has this idea – George Osborne for Tory Mayor of London – been written in loads of places and I have just missed it? Not sure. Anyway, it just hit me earlier mid-argument about the former Chancellor’s borderline bananas headlines on Brexit. Almost every day the splash headline of his newspaper The London Evening Standard presents the British negotiating position in the worst possible light. The consensus – Paul Goodman, editor of Conservative Home, apart – is that Osborne, having had his chips in terms of elected office, has given up entirely on having a future in the Conservative party. I’m not sure.

Isn’t Osborne’s most likely route back into politics – which he loves – the London mayoralty in May 2020? By the time a candidate is selected, Theresa May, Osborne’s hate figure, will almost certainly have retired, enabling Os to reconnect with the Tories unless he has done too much damage to that relationship with all that Standard stuff in the meantime.

Would Osborne fit as Mayor of London? Yes, he is a modern metropolitan liberal with a social conscience. Conveniently, he also has a campaigning media platform, the Standard. He could stand aside from the editorship to fight the campaign itself if he stood, but until then use it to make the running on crime, transport and investment in London.

Meanwhile, Labour’s Mayor of London Sadiq Khan is struggling badly. Knife crime is surging. Moped gangs are marauding while he tweets images of himself welcoming to London Hillary Clinton, the person who failed to beat Trump.

Although the national UK picture favours Khan right now and the Tories fear wipeout in assorted local and assembly elections in London, that could change. Imagine the plot twists. Tory leader Boris Johnson makes Michael Gove Chancellor and then brings back George Osborne to be Mayor.

In 2019 the Conservatives will choose someone to take on Khan in a city that is full of Remainers. George Osborne fits perfectly with London’s view of the great enterprise (yippee!) of leaving the European Union. Osborne is about as anti-Brexit as you can find. He makes Anna Soubry or Ken Clarke look like Bernard Jenkin. The former Chancellor could simply say to London voters that he had always opposed leaving the EU.

But wouldn’t losing all that lovely lolly from his part-time post in the City which brings in £600,000 for one day per week, on top of the Standard gig, be an obstacle. Perhaps, but several years of what he’s doing now will do him very nicely. And then, how much more does he need? Time for a new challenge? Dare he try to find a way back in? Mayor of London, the city he loves? Once a politician, always a politician.