Spanking tales expose more than Osborne

THERE has always been an air of the impudent schoolboy about George Gideon Osborne. From the infamous Bullingdon Club photograph that shows him staring defiantly into the camera, an expression on his face that suggests he aspires to nothing less than world domination and Carol Vorderman in a twinset, to his robust, over-confident performances at the despatch box, one always gets the impression that the burdens of life have never truly weighed down on the shoulders of the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Rarely was that schoolboy more evident than at a recent award ceremony for men’s magazine GQ. We shall set aside for now the fact that the readers of GQ voted Osborne their Politician of the Year (I mean, really? Who came second, Chris Huhne? Robert Mugabe?) and focus instead on his toe-curling acceptance speech.

“I’m not sure who actually reads the politics pages of GQ magazine,” he told his audience. “I suspect they are the only pages that a teenage boy hasn’t stuck together in reading the magazine. Some might say that’s because the w****** are on the page rather than reading them.”

Cue an uncomfortable silence, as the evening’s host, Peep Show star David Mitchell, a man who regularly performs defecation gags on screen, remarked that the Chancellor had somewhat “lowered the tone”. Oh dear.

This week, there has been rather a lot of tone lowering going on as a result of an interview given by a former acquaintance of Osborne named Natalie Rowe. Rowe, who once worked as a call girl and met Osborne in 1993, made a series of what have been described as “lurid allegations” about Osborne to Australia’s ABC network involving the use of cocaine and the nature of their relationship.

It has also given every newspaper in the country the opportunity to run, once again, a photograph of Osborne taken at a party in 1994 with his arm around Rowe, a cigarette in hand, and a rather smug grin on his face.

The nub of Rowe’s allegations – outside the fact she apparently worked as a dominatrix with the nickname “Mistress Pain” – is that she alleges that Osborne apparently felt he “owed” Andy Coulson, the former editor of the News of The World who was later hired by Number 10 before becoming mired in the phone hacking scandal, as Coulson managed to water down the original story about him and Rowe when it was first covered in 2005.

These, of course, are serious allegations. But part of the problem with a tale like this is that the nature of it reduces grown men to the same sort of giggling schoolboy that Osborne so often seems to represent.

APPARENTLY, Osborne aides were answering the phone to journalists on Monday with the question: “Banking or spanking?” One commentator on Sky News, surveying a picture of Rowe, remarked: “I thought cocaine was supposed to make you thin. It hasn’t worked on her.” The degrading word “hooker” is being trotted out regularly.

It’s all become a bit nudge-nudge wink-wink, “round the back of the bike sheds” stuff. Not only does it once again make Westminster look like a sort of giant public school for boys, it makes me wonder if, indeed, we really do live in the 21st century after all.

We all have elements of our past that we would rather did not see the light of day, silly things we did when we were young and, more likely than not, now regret. The measure is how, as an adult, you deal with the situation, should it come crashing back into your life to haunt you.

If, as it has been alleged, it is indeed the case that Osborne felt he had to chum up to Coulson and return “the favour” by giving him a job, it smacks to me of the very worst of boyish classroom tactics, and lays bare an worryingly childish streak in the man charged with looking after the country’s finances.

And I don’t know about you, but I’ve had quite enough of impudent schoolboys.