George Osborne wished to approach this week, Master Tactician that he is, setting the news agenda away from ‘The Millionaire’s Tax Cut’, for a debate about welfare reform. However, George Osborne is stuck in a mental rut, as well as perhaps “gutter politics” as proposed by Ed Balls MP, that the welfare reform debate is about shirkers v strivers, not about the pensions of the elderly which in fact constitute the bulk of the budget currently. Osborne in Torytown Toryshire earlier this week used the same image of shirkers being in bed with their curtains closed (with some of the words interchanged) while strivers go to work in the morning. Osborne therefore fundamentally wants to articulate his welfare debate in the language of ‘fairness’. He doesn’t wish to talk about those Directors of HBOS which have been alleged to underperform and who had been holding ludrative positions elsewhere. Not that kind of fairness. He doesn’t particularly wish to talk about tax avoidance – even though he has a “crack squad” of a handful of people looking into the billions which disappear because of multinational tax avoidance. No, instead, Osborne is pathologically stuck in a mental mindset of pointing the finger “at those below you” who earn more by doing less, not “at those above you” who earn more by doing much less.

Enter Mick Philpott. Like Ed Miliband ‘wants to have a conversation with you’, George Osborne wants you to have a debate about shirker psychology. However, Osborne’s fundamental problem is that benefit fraud, even according to the DWPs’ own statistics, is a relatively minor problem compared to other problems in the welfare budget. Also, it is dangerous to construct policy on the basis of one extreme example, for the same reason you would not necessarily reconstruct the entire policy of inheritance tax based on the recent Seddon case. The Daily Mail and George Osborne have undoubtedly succeeded in their primary goal of having people “discuss” this issue; except the discussion is one of competing shrills, of blame and counterblame, and there is a lot of noise compared to a weak signal.

This morning, George Osborne is facing more criticism over welfare reforms after he was photographed getting into a car parked in a disabled space. The picture shows the Chancellor being picked up by his official car in a restricted bay, after he stopped for lunch at the Magor services on the M4 in Monmouthshire. Senior Conservative sources said he had been to buy food from McDonald’s and was not aware the Land Rover had been inappropriately parked. George Osborne’s parking spot, on the front cover of the Daily Mirror, is a problem for a number of reasons. The embarrassing incident comes as the chancellor stands accused of pushing through welfare reforms that will hurt the disabled, including housing benefit cuts for people with spare rooms. The disability charity Scope says 3.7 million people will be affected by the government’s welfare cuts, losing £28.3bn of support by 2018. The charity’s chief executive, Richard Hawkes, told the Mirror the incident “shows how wildly out of touch the chancellor is with disabled people in the UK”. He said: “They will see this as rubbing salt in their wounds.

The issue is that George Osborne’s “team” appears to be taking up a parking space which should be taken up by a “real” disabled citizen. This taps into the “hypocrisy” attack of voters which is a very potent one – and when it is combined with an attack on someone perceived as privileged, there is a lot of political capital in it. This argument is only tenable if it happens that George Osborne’s driver is not disabled; it is perfectly possible for him or her to be a person with an obvious disability or a “hidden” disability. If the criticism of Osborne’s “team” is correct, then the idea of someone claiming something fraudulent is exactly what Osborne has seemed to accuse disabled citizens of. Osborne’s defence is one of ignorance, and indeed it is perfectly possible that his “team” parked in this parking spot negligently or innocently rather than fraudulently. However, it is a fundamental tenet of the English law that ignorance is no defence, in other words “ignorantia non excusat juris”.  Nobody is above the law, including George Osborne, even if it is possible for the Coalition to rewrite hurriedly the law if it does not suit their purposes with the help of Labour (such as happened recently with the Workfare vote over which a number of Labour MPs were forced to rebel.)

The starting point is, of course, that George Osborne is inherently unpopular with Labour voters (and some within the Conservative Party say that he is inherently unpopular with many within the Conservative Party as well.) A lot of this is “personality politics”, in part contributed to by Osborne himself who appears to revel in playing a ‘pantomime villain’. He was openly very hostile to Alistair Darling, but since May 2010 when the economy was in fact in a fragile recovery, he has driven the economy at high speed in the reverse gear, and, whether or not the service sector recovers, he has taken the UK economy through a “double dip”.

Of course, the issue is a “storm in a teacup”, compared to NHS management, the management of the economy, etc., and Conservatives will feel that it is ludicrous that Osborne is being harrassed into apologising for a relatively minor incident. It is impossible to locate somebody who has never made a mistake. However, in the political “rough-and-tumble” ‘every little bit helps’, and the incident is not an isolated one contributing to an overall ambience of perceived incompetence. The other famous incident is of course when Osborne claimed that “his team” was unable to upgrade his standard class ticket to First Class, while he was merrily sitting in First Class. After a while these incidents, while perhaps unfortunate, all blend into the “pantomime villain” persona of George Osborne as a man who simply doesn’t care. A man who doesn’t care is normally pretty unattractive to voters, even in “white van” (or “white suit”) Tatton.