Sir George Gideon Oliver Osborne MP: Liar or Fool?

George Gideon Oliver Osborne's Wiki Entry is full of loose ends and adverse information. Allegations of cocaine use, disgraceful insulting use of the term "autistic", Bullingdon Club membership, outright lies about a White House meeting, and repeated 80 and 90% mendacity scores on Channel 4's Factcheck* feature are among them.

Unfortunately his latest piece of utterly inaccurate cobblers, as told to the Manchester Evening News (Today's City Edition p21) is not showing up on the website. But as a servant of truth and justice I'll patiently and faithfully re-key it:

[Headline]Families 'hit by tax bill of £50 a week'[/headline]

POORER families and struggling small businesses in Greater Manchester have been 'clobbered' by government tax rises, says shadow chancellor George Osborne.
He claims the tax bill for an average Manchester family will rise by £50 a week after Alistair Darling's recent tax rises.
Mr Osborne said the chancellor was 'out of his depth'.
The Tatton MP, shadow minister for Manchester, told the M.E.N. that the city would be particularly hard hit by Labour's 'wrongheaded' tax plans.
Mr Osborne said: "Hard working people across Manchester who save through their companies' share ownership could lose out as a result of Labour's latest tax rises.
"As usual, there wasn't a word of warning about this in the chancellor's pre-budget report but the average tax bill for a Manchester family will rise by £2,600 a year for the next five years."
He said Conservatives were committed to increasing the inheritance tax threshold sounding the death knell to death taxes, and lifting nine out of 10 first time buyers out of the stamp duty net."

There you go Mr McGOO, a verbatim re-typing of your arrant nonsense. If Conservative Central HQ or Cllr Iain Lindley of Salford would now explain how the average family in Manchester is 5 pence never mind £50 worse off a week than before Alistair Darling's speech I will also print that explanation verbatim.

In answer to my own question: as GOO is a Magdalen College scholarship boy we have to assume he is not a fool, he is repeating such things over and over again despite corrections so we cannot conclude he is mistaken, which leaves just one explanation.

Most of us these days don't give a monkeys whether George Osborne snorted cocaine with vice girls - an accusation he strenuously if not entirely convincingly denies - but we do care about his runaway addiction to MENDACITY.

Reading Postcards from the edge, more so than watching the film perhaps, shows us how these vices - cocaine and mendacity, or "talking shit" - are linked.

Obviously George issues mangled denials on the former - and who cares - but he seems to be in dire need of a 12-Step-Programme to conquer his appalling predeliction for, nay addiction to fibbery.

* As we revealed here Channel 4's excellent factcheck service found that Tory positioning on Labour's tax regime was 90% mendacious while on the likes of IHT and non doms their own plans were a mere 60% mendacious.