George Osborne

Biography

George Osborne was born Gideon Oliver Osborne in Paddington in 1971, the eldest son of Sir Peter Osborne, co-founder of the wallpaper firm Osborne & Little; he took the name George as a teenager. Educated at St Paul's School, he read modern history at Magdalen College, Oxford, from 1990 to 1993.

After freelance work for The Daily Telegraph he joined the Conservative Research Department in 1994. He was a special adviser to agriculture minister Douglas Hogg, worked in John Major's political office during the 1997 campaign, and then served William Hague as speechwriter and political secretary. In 2001 he was elected MP for Tatton, becoming the youngest Conservative in the Commons.

Michael Howard made him shadow chief secretary to the Treasury in 2004 and shadow chancellor in 2005, a post he kept after running David Cameron's leadership campaign. As Chancellor of the Exchequer from May 2010 he pursued deep austerity to cut the deficit left by the financial crisis, launched the Northern Powerhouse, cut the top rate of income tax in his widely criticised 2012 budget and introduced a sugar tax. From 2015 he was also First Secretary of State. He campaigned for Remain in the 2016 referendum and was dismissed by Theresa May in July 2016.

He left the Commons in 2017 and edited the Evening Standard from May 2017 to 2020, a move criticised for its conflicts of interest. He has since worked in finance as an adviser to BlackRock and a banker at Robey Warshaw, chaired the Northern Powerhouse Partnership and, from 2021, the British Museum, and co-hosts the podcast Political Currency with Ed Balls.