Is George Osborne All That Bad?

No, bear with me.

He is an extreme social liberal who has voted to retain abortion into the very latest stages of pregnancy and, rather oddly for the heir of a baronetcy, against requiring the providers of fertility treatment to take account of the child's need for a father, but in favour of allowing two persons of the same sex to be listed as the parents on a birth certificate.

He is also a hardline neocon internationally, as this week's behaviour over Iran has made only too abundantly clear, and again as one does not really expect from a man who is impeccably a proper toff, for all that he was called "Oik" in the Bullingdon Club because his father was a mere baronet and was in trade.

He has never expressed any remorse, not only for having belonged to an organisation for the purpose of becoming drunk and disorderly before committing criminal damage and even assault, but also for cocaine use and for visiting prostitutes.

He wants the Eurozone to become a fiscal union, a single state, a country called Europe.

But he is in favour of restoring a manufacturing-based economy diffused around the country. He is in favour of using the full force of the statute law to impose an absolute division between retail banking and investment banking. He is rumoured to be about to freeze increases in train fares. He is in favour of using public money to pay businesses to take on unemployed youths. And he is in favour of similar State aid to small businesses generally, recalling his stated view that, where banks are concerned, "too big to fail is too big".

Now, is there any chance of passing the Chancellorship of the Exchequer to a supporter of manufacturing, of a truly national economy, of a British Glass-Steagall, of affordable public transport, and of harnessing the power of the State to create jobs and to keep businesses family and community-friendly, but not in favour of infanticide, of hilarious yet pernicious denials of biological reality, of the neoconservative war agenda, of juvenile delinquency, of illegal drug use, of prostitution, or of Eurofederalism?

Iain Duncan Smith?

Or must we wait for Ed Miliband to repay with Number 11 those who had put him into Number 10?