Skipper

I can't pretend I envied the Coalition government's task back in May 2010. I was kind of relieved that Labour were no longer there under Brown to disappoint, mess up and make me feel bad about being a supporter of his party. It was always going to be a big ask to fulfill his stated aims- and through a mixture of obstinacy, ambition and ignorance, he hasn't disappointed those who said he'd fail. It was so obvious that with an economy as fragile as ours George's cold bath treatment was going to cause the patient to weaken further. And, successive lowering of predicted growth forecasts has proved beyond doubt that his famous Plan A has flushed down the toilet.

We now see economic indicators going south at a tragic rate of knots. Inflation is running at 5.2% so all the tiny increases ordinary folk have managed to gather- as opposed to the 49% the FTSE directors have tucked into their offshore accounts over the last year- have been instantly eroded away. And the resultant lack of growth has produced an additional £158bn borrowing requirement on top of the mountain he faced 18 months ago.

He refused to contemplate a Plan B to stimulate growth and ridiculed the ideas brought forward like investment in infrastructure projects, help for small businesses and so forth. But now, with the economy gurgling down the plug hole, he suddenly discovers these ideas are exactly what wee need. And who will pay for these economic stimulations? The money required will be cut from other parts of the public sector, causing a total of 700,000 job losses by 2015. Cutting of such big slice from the public sector was supposed to stimulate the private sector to grow and produce a slew of new jobs. What happened? Nothing whatsoever- proof of the poverty of Osborne's approach. If he had palns to take over from Dave as PM, he should seriously consider another line of work.

Moreover, instead of removing the deficit by 2015 in time to win the next election, he's had, humiliatingly, to delay his schedule until 2016-7. An age of austerity truly awaits us and George has proved no magician, just a journeyman politico basing his ideas on long forgotten economic thinker- in this case Friedrich Hayek. Had he reduced the size of his cuts, as Darling proposed, the economy would not be in such a parlous state and might even be showing signs of life instead of needing intensive care.

Certainly his focus on reducing the deficit has kept lending rates down to 2.5% instead of Italy and Spain's 7-8% but experts doubt our own rates, based on long term borrowing rather than the short-term Italian variety, would have gone up unacceptably, had Osborne moderated his surgery of the public sector.

All this is bad enough- total humiliating failure- but it is predicated on the assumption that the Euro crisis will clear up and carry on as before. This is by no means likely to be the case. My reading of the euro currency crisis is that Italy might well be left to default and then the brown substance will really hit the fan dragging down UK's economy into a deep recession and an age of austerity stretching into the foreseeable future. What will the voters think in 2015? Not, I suspect what Dave and George and their well heeled mates confidently expected. Cameron will rue the day he put all his trust- and his party's not to mention the nation's future- in Osborne's economic judgement.