Osborne loses (one of) his jobs – this is the man who will replace him

The Daily Mail reports today that George Osborne will no longer be running the Tory 2015 election campaign. It’s unclear whether that’s because Cameron has realised that Osborne isn’t, in fact, a master strategist – or whether those “part-time chancellor” attacks have begun to stick. Either way, George is out on his ear – sadly not from the Treasury, but from the job he seemed to care about most anyway.

What is much more concerning is the man the Tories look likely to replace him with – Lynton Crosby.

Now the Mail refers to him as the man “who masterminded both of Boris Johnson’s London mayoral election victories”. That’s only half of the story. Whilst their was evidently negative campaigning in the mayoral campaign, it never quite reached the dog-whistle tactics of some of Crosby’s previous efforts. Remember the 2005 Tory election campaign “Are you thinking what we’re thinking?” – let this (albeit somewhat modified version – the originals seem to have disappeared) refresh your memory:

I wouldn’t be expecting many positive messages from the Tories in 2015 with Crosby in charge. And we should be prepared for some particularly vicious personal attacks on Ed Miliband too, I’d imagine…