Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne. Photo credit: Crown copyright
Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne has had a challenging Monday morning. His immediate backing for ring-fencing of the leading British banks, as set out in Sir John Vickers’ Independent Banking Commission recommendations, has sparked criticism from bankers and commentators. But that’s likely the least of his worries right now; the recently crowned GQ magazine politician of the year is back at the centre of a cocaine and prostitutes scandal after an Australian news programme carried allegations made by ex sex worker Natalie Rowe that he regularly took cocaine with her in the mid 1990s. The allegations initially surfaced in The News of the World in October 2005.
The latest allegations are detailed on the website of the ABC programme ‘PM’ with further claims expected to be made later on an ABC TV programme. Here’s the meatiest bit from the Rowe interview which you can listen to here: “At the time he (Osborne) was working for William Hague. I remember that vividly because he called William Hague insipid and I didn’t know what the word meant. I do now. So he definitely was in government by then but I think he was getting more and more of a high profile. So there was definitely cocaine on that night on the table. George Osborne did take cocaine on that night. And not just on that night. He took it on a regular basis with me, with his friends. There were more witnesses, not just me, that witnessed George Osborne taking cocaine … On that particular night he had taken a line. And I said to George jokingly that when you’re prime minister one day I’ll have all the dirty goods on you. And he laughed and took a big fat line of cocaine.”
- Links to phone hacking. Leading UK political blogger Guido Fawkes has made sure the emerging allegations from down under haven’t gone unnoticed with regular updates and snippets through Monday morning: “The story that is tantalising Westminster this morning is that ABC News are going to broadcast an interview with Natalie Rowe where she alleges that she took cocaine with George Osborne during £350-a-time dominatrix sessions.” Fawkes insisted that the “new hook for the story is that she (Rowe) is suing the News of the World for hacking her phone whereas when the Metropolitan police told George Osborne his phone was also hacked, he wasn’t interested in pursuing the issue. The story has been re-hashed as a result of the pending legal action. The underlying suspicion of many seasoned Westminster observers is that Coulson’s hire was more Osborne than Cameron’s doing. A few weeks ago this point was being made in comment pieces on the media pages of the broadsheets. There was then a spate of stories suggesting that it was in fact Hague who was responsible for bringing Coulson into the Tory family, Hague was formerly a columnist for Andy Coulson’s News of the World. That briefing was put about to undermine the idea that Osborne had any motivation, quid pro quo, to hire Coulson.”
When the story originally broke, did then-editor of The News of the World Andy Coulson let Osborne off lightly? That’s what Rowe’s lawyer Paul Lewis has suggested.
- Soft editorial stance? Samira Shackle of The New Statesman Staggers blog also picked up on the possibility that Coulson’s News of the World gave Osborne an easy ride when the Sunday tabloid originally broke the story via an editorial: “Rowe and her lawyer, Mark Lewis, also allege that Andy Coulson’s (then editor of the News of the World) soft editorial stance on the photo in question might have affected Coulson’s later appointment as the Conservatives’ communications director. Rowe decided to sell her story to the Sunday Mirror, but was shocked to see it appear in the News of the World. The story was accompanied by an editorial dismissing Rowe’s story and asserting that ‘Mr Osborne robustly condemns drugs for the destruction they wreak.’”
Neither Osborne’s press secretary nor the Conservative Party have so far responded to the allegations.
