Why Don't The Tories Do Economics?

George Osborne is the latest in a long line of Conservative Chancellors to be taken seriously by no proper economist on earth.

It will not make a jot of difference, because past Conservative Chancellors are treated as economic gurus, no matter how rubbish they were at the job.

Nigel Lawson is, even though he presided over one recession, he caused another, he resigned in protest that Thatcher was not then yet prepared to join the ERM, and he now openly admits that his Big Bang contributed significantly to the Crash a generation later.

If he had lived, then even Tony Barber, with a reasonable claim to have been the worst Chancellor ever, would have been so revered. His party has to tell itself that the Heath Government was "brought down by the miners", rather than by millions of people's votes against its stagflationary incompetence.

Next to that kind of record, Osborne's will look positively sparkling. Against the record of a proper Chancellor, of course, it will dazzle rather less.

But no one ever makes that comparison. Labour has been accused of having "left chaos" since time immemorial, and that has always been taken entirely at face value by the most partisan press in the world.

Newspapers are, and ought to be, political everywhere. Holding firmly to an ideology or to a broader set of principles will ordinarily mean supporting a particular political party, at least most of the time.

In Britain, however, we have something else. Almost our entire national newspaper market simply supports whatever the Conservative Party happens to say, for no other reason than that the Conservative Party happens to say it.

As soon as that party adopts a policy, then that policy is self-evidently the distilled quintessence of common sense, even if it is the opposite of what was the policy the previous day, and even if it has already been screamed down as utter lunacy when it was Labour policy, which it might very well still be.

Every leading Conservative figure is a titanic statesman of brilliant intellect and impeccable character, while every other politician is a joke or worse. And so it goes on, and on, and on, and on, and on.

Even David Axelrod was shocked, and it is difficult to imagine that that happens awfully often.

But why don't Tories care about economics? Of course, they rarely read even the simplest of books very much, if at all. They are not the right-wing intellectuals of the Continent or of the American Old Right.

The reason here, however, also goes much deeper, and yet it is strikingly simple.

Whereas people who grow up poor grow up wondering why they are poor, people who grow up rich do not grow up wondering why they are rich.

Oh, well, since by the miracle of Iain Duncan Smith it is now impossible to grow up poor in Britain, we may expect such questions never again to occur to anyone, thus keeping the Conservative Party in office until the End of Days.