2005: Osborne instead of Cameron

[Yokai Man]

As some of you know,Michael Howard more or less fixed the 2005 Conservative Leadership race in favour of Cameron but Dave was not the first choice as the Stop Davis Candidate. After he said no to Howard asking him to be Shadow Chancellor (mostly due to being afraid of facing Brown in the Commons as he was not as experienced yet),Michael considered George Osborne to be his heir to be,even putting him in place of Letwin.

According to Gove and others though,George did not want to because that meant Dave could not get the top job and he did not want to ruin his friendship with him so he said no and Howard was forced to groom Dave.

But what if Cameron was unavailable? What if he remained outside of Parliament?

Not that hard to do,honestly-Witney,like almost every Tory seat in 1997,was narrowly kept so it is easy to turn it red and also have Dave not win a seat next election-especially if Prescott still punches that demented pro fox hunting protester who attacked him.

So-Osborne says yes. What then? How will things be changed? Will the press take note of his cocaine past or ignore it?

 

[Lucon50]

I don't see Osborne as particularly likeable to the electorate even then, but he would still represent a more socially liberal, 'modern' kind of Conservatism while being Thatcherite underneath. You could see Brown narrowly winning a 2007 poll, with a potential Tory leadership question afterwards, or Osborne scraping together a coalition with the slightly bigger Lib Dems in 2010.

 

[Lidenbrock]

Osborne's problem is that he often thinks he's smarter than he is. Like Ed Balls, that brand of confrontationalism really turns people off unless your target is unpopular anyway, so he would do better against Brown from 2008 onwards, but he probably annoys a lot of people even on his own side.

I don't doubt his committment to modernisation but the important thing with Osborne is how it's received - he's not the kind of personality to consciously make friends of his rivals, and the faint air of cynicism around everything he does won't help either. Come the financial crash, he'll not only appeal to the drier economic Tories but also look and be much more off a sterner Thatcherite than Cameron could pretend to not be. So a worse result in 2010 sounds about right.

 

[AH Layard]

Yeah, Osborne is just too easy to dislike and not relatable. The stuff about Bullingdon and drug use would hit him much harder. He was 34 years old in 2005, five years younger than Cameron.

I could see Brown having the confidence to go for a snap election in 2007 and winning a small but governable majority. Osborne falls flat in the campaign and is pushed out in favour of someone like Davis or Fox.

Another interesting POD would be if Portillo hadn’t lost his hunger for the leadership in 2001 (IDS beat him by one vote in the third ballot), if he had gone through against Clarke he may have won, depending on who the Right despise the most. Then you have an attempt at modernisation two years earlier, but with a more hostile party.

 

[Juan Vogel]

There's also the risk that the Sour Grapes Email of 2023 was indicative of his behaviour then as well so if so maybe that might come out