An unexpected silver lining to leaving government is that I have a much nicer parliamentary office. The Chancellor’s traditional room in the House of Commons is rather dank and gloomy, with peeling ceiling plaster. Despite repeated efforts by pest control, it is overrun with moths. As a backbencher, my new office is, by contrast, a large, bright room overlooking the Thames and the London Eye. The office used to belong to David Davis, who was — rather reluctantly, I understand — forced to vacate it on entering government. So far I have resisted the jovial advice from various fellow MPs to have my new room swept to make sure it is free of bugs of a different kind.
My office sits on a corner of Portcullis House, which some have taken to calling the Naughty Corner. I presume this is because my friend Michael Gove has moved in two doors away, although my immediate neighbour Mark Field joined the club when his assistant inadvertently revealed the government’s secret plans for Brexit. My other neighbour is Sir Simon Burns MP. Simon is universally liked in the Conservative party and utterly detested by Speaker Bercow — two facts that are not unconnected. Simon is, in fact, a Democratic Congressman pretending to be a British MP. His office walls are decorated solely with the campaign posters of Bobby Kennedy, Jimmy Carter and Hillary Clinton. I had a £50 bet with him in the summer that Hillary would lose to Trump. I saw too many similarities with the Brexit campaign. A week after the election, a doleful and depressed Simon handed me an envelope. Inside were my winnings, and a card. It read: ‘You won; the world lost’.
This is an extract from George Osborne's Notebook, which can be found in the Christmas issue of the Spectator