BOY GEORGE UNCOVERED

THE EMERGENCY BUDGET PRESENTED yesterday by George “Boy Gideon” Osborne (see Sunday Morning, October 2009) must be one of the clearest misnomers of recent times, suggesting that there is truth in the allegation that George hasn’t a clue about what he is doing. The word “emergency” (it says here in my dictionary) means “pressing necessity” and “requiring immediate action”. Thus, a budget that leaves its most important measure to come into effect only in January 2011 should really not be granted this name. And after all the alarmist hoo-hah, one wonders what the fuss was all about. If there is not howling, wailing and a-gnashing of teeth at the moment then the Chancellor cannot be doing what he threatened to do, although, as a good Conservative, he has hammered both single and married women, state school children, the disabled, working class families and the lumpen. The fact that they will not really feel the pain until next year means that Boy George really does want to hurt them, but taunt them first.

YET THERE ARE THOSE WHO are miffed in the short term about the immediate response to the budget announcements made by normally dull and soft-spoken Harriet Harman, deputy leader of what is left of the Labour Party. It is not common for a politician to describe a fellow MP as a “fig leaf”, so when Harman singled out the most conspicuous fig leaves among the LibDems some members of the house who have not had training in classical painting and sculpture were slightly confused. Describing Nick Clegg as Davy Cameron’s fig leaf as well as Vince Cable and Danny Alexander, the two most prominent LibDems in ministerial positions, as Tory fig leaves was not perhaps the best attack on the idiotic coalition of two parties who could not have been more antagonistic in the election campaign, but it was enough.

IN THE SAME DICTIONARY AS ABOVE, it says that a fig leaf “covers up something disgusting or embarrassing”. I am not sure who wrote this dictionary entry, but I am reliably informed by an imaginary friend I sometimes talk to that a fig leaf usually covers up “a penis and testicles”.