Does Osborne want to be right more than he wants to win?

Sheer bafflement was the only reasonable reaction, upon reading today that the Tories have decided to fight back against Labour’s successful “Cost of Living Crisis” narrative by claiming that everything’s fine and there isn’t one. 

George Osborne – alleged political strategist par excellence – has decided that the best approach to everyone feeling worse off than they were three years ago is to go “Hey guys, it’s fine, you’ve all been getting richer this last year. Honestly. Even if you didn’t feel it, that was totally happening”. He’s not daft to do it himself though of course – he got his tame gopher Skills Minister Matt Hancock to do it.

Now that’s an incredibly bold strategy, but it’s also political hair-kari of the highest order.

The fact is that it contradicts what people have seen with their own eyes and felt in their own pockets. Just five days ago, YouGov’s Anthony Wells wrote this over at the indispensable UK Polling Report following the YouGov/Sunday Times poll:

“Ask about people’s own finances and only 14% think they are better off than a year ago, 39% think they are worse off. Asked about the year ahead, only 17% think their own household’s finances will get better, 37% think they’ll get worse.”

Perhaps this means that George Osborne has a 14% strategy – or perhaps he thinks that the 86% of people who don’t think they’re better off than last year will be won over. Perhaps they’ll say “Yes, I did have to start putting on an extra jumper for bed each night because the house was so cold, but gosh now Matt Hancock says I’ve been better off after all I’ve remembered that everything’s alright actually”.

This seems an unlikely course of events – and indeed the IFS have taken the Tories to task for statistical-mangling today as a result of their bizarre attempt to rewrite history. Here’s what IFS Chief Paul Johnson told the Today Programme:

“If you’re looking at the a whole of household income, a lot of this information is a little bit out of date. We’ve done our own work looking at where we think things will be going and it does look pretty clear that, as I said, by 2015 incomes won’t have recovered their 2010 or 2008 levels.”

Or to put it another way – it’s nonsense on stilts.

So why did the Tories throw the ball into their own net like some sort of economic David De Gea. What could possibly have possessed them to adopt such a catastrophically tin-eared strategy?

There’s only one plausible explanation. George Osborne actually believes there is no crisis in the cost of living – despite what the polls and the analysts say. He genuinely believes that for most people things are improving. And despite it being complete anathema to the vast majority of the British people, he thinks they should be told. Because he cares more about trying to prove that he was right than he does about winning…