Hot Features
Premium
Trade like a pro: Leverage real-time discussions and market-moving ideas to outperform.
You have to feel sorry for the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
After spending thirteen years loathing your own name you decide to ditch Gideon and become George instead, only to be taunted with cries of ‘Oi, Gideon!’ from your political opponents every time you get up to speak.
But as soon as President Obama confused the Chancellor with American funk musician Jeffrey Osborne a new chapter in Gideon/George/Jeffrey’s name saga began.
By becoming the UK’s chief economic and finance official you’d have thought you could put all your name difficulties to bed, but you simply couldn’t foresee that one day the leader of the free world would bound into view and undo all those years spent patiently explaining that your name is actually George.
You can feel the blood draining from your face as you hear him, of all people, say it and your shoulders collapsing every subsequent time he thinks you are sixty-five year old who believes that “Woo woo, you should be mine, woo woo”.
As the news hits the press you realise that the Syrian rebels aren’t the only force that the President has armed with munitions, as teams of Labour apparatchiks’ brains go into overtime thinking of ways to humiliate you further and knowing you will have to pretend to take it in good spirit.
A helpful Spad tries to make it better by suggesting you make a joke about it on twitter, “Why not say that you can’t sing Minister? It would show you are a good sport and all that!” And so you find yourself authorising a tweet saying how you’ve been offered the chance to sing with the Jeffrey Osborne, who only days ago you didn’t have had the foggiest clue who he was.
Was this what Gladstone had to put up with? Did Pitt the Younger ever have to issue a statement filled with faux-bonhomie about his inability to reach the high-notes in the descant? You can console yourself though that, unlike Norman Lamont, you are not being asked questions about singing Edith Piaf in the bath.
All that work you’d done preparing your Mansion House speech, the positive news about the UK economy starting to turn the corner and the announcement that Lloyds was ready to be put back in private hands lost in a sea of snarky articles rubbing salt into the still open wound.
Perhaps it would have been easier to stick with Gideon, eh George?
