Jeremy Corbyn says Morgan Stanley are right to call him a “threat” – and one top Labour figure is hedging his bets. Alistair Darling, who joined Morgan Stanley’s board of directors in 2015, has just sold $189,766 of his shares in the bank. He still owns shares with a value of $700,000 so it doesn’t look like he’s yet been convinced Jezza will make it to Number 10. Corbyn says the former Labour Chancellor’s firm are “speculators and gamblers” whose “greed plunged the world into crisis”…
Osborne is finally dropping the Remainers’ dead cat – which was expected by many next week – the idea is it is so visceral, so extreme, the papers will talk about little else. It may well work on the broadsheets, they may well talk about little else. The Times leads on his dire warnings:
- 2p added to the 20p basic rate of income tax
- 3p added to the 40p higher rate of income tax
- 5p on the rate of inheritance tax, taking it from 40p to 45p
- A 5% jump in fuel and alcohol duties
- £2 billion cut from the pensions bill
- 2% cuts to the “protected” NHS, schools and defence budgets
- 5% cuts in budgets like policing, transport and councils
This is the Remainers’ ultimate “Project Fear” gambit, a quantum politics derived nuclear bomb – the Anti-Vow – whereas the Scottish Referendum’s Solemn Vow promised milk and honey, the Brexit Anti-Vow is for hell and damnation. Alongside Alistair Darling, George Osborne will swear the political establishment’s fiscal pain vow on a scale not seen even in Greece. All because we voted to change our trading arrangements over a 2 year negotiation after implementing Article 50 of the EU Treaty. Only one gigantic logical flaw. Following a Brexit vote he won’t be Chancellor and there would never be a majority in parliament for this even if he were. This is the political equivalent of Schrödinger’s dead cat. When we open the Brexit box it won’t even be there…
http://twitter.com/TogetherDarling/status/502817546094252032
If Darling did not do the right thing and nominate Gordon next, Guido will be very disappointed…
Alistair Darling writes in tomorrow’s Speccie diary…
“I display my knife skills, carving the meat. Who says Labour can’t cut?”
We learn from Alistair Darling’s memoirs that immediately after James Purnell resigned Gordon Brown reluctantly gave up on replacing him with Ed Balls. The course of history would have been very different if the kamikaze economic duo had got total control of the economy in 2009. The Prime Mentalist and Banzaii Balls would have pushed us into Greek territory…
The other counter-factual piece of history concerns the subsequent secret meeting on the farm between David Miliband and Alistair Darling. If David Miliband had the courage to tell Darling that they should oust Brown, history might be very different. They could have forced Brown out, changed economic course and lured the LibDems into a post-election coalition. The Rose Garden could have been the scene of a Miliband-Clegg romance. Miliband lacked the cojones to take the gamble, unlike his younger brother.
One question remains for Guido. Who owned the Essex farm that was the scene of their meeting? Who did they both trust enough not to reveal their dangerous liason? Essex farms don’t come cheap…
UPDATE: Guido’s Essex boy reckons that the “friend’s farm” at which Darling met Miliband probably belonged to Catherine MacLeod, his spin-mistress.
