What a man of the people' he is. That's what we were meant to think when the chancellor posted a picture of himself on Twitter putting the finishing touches to his spending review speech alongside a burger and fries. But the stunt backfired. Declaring the incident a "Shamburger!", The Sun denounced Osborne as a fraud the Byron burger with chips and a red onion garnish (cost £9.70) was far too posh, it said.
Too posh? That's news to me, says Jan Moir in the Daily Mail. Actually, Byron's 20 or so high-street outlets are hugely popular and not at all over-priced. "In fact, as Byron is British-owned and serves burgers that are freshly ground every day from Scottish beef, surely this is exactly the sort of burger a chancellor of the exchequer should be eating?"
Clearly this wasn't the view of the BBC's Evan Davis, who was "keen as mustard to give the Chancellor a grilling" when he appeared on the Today programme the next day. "The chancellor may have had chips on his plate. It is becoming increasingly apparent that Davis has got chips on both shoulders. He's so rude and biased to Osborne while always giving slippery Ed Balls an easy ride that it is becoming laughable."
First, Davis ignored the positive messages in Osborne's speech, quizzing him about putting up taxes on the poor and hardly letting the chancellor complete a sentence without interrupting. Then he wanted to know why Osborne had been eating a "posh" burger not one from McDonald's. And why hadn't he gone out and got it himself? "Most people don't get the burgers delivered, you see," Davis told the chancellor.
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How ridiculous. Do we really want our senior Cabinet ministers rushing out to buy their own takeaways? The way Davis was carrying on, as Moir says, "you would think Osborne was dining on roast swan with caviar, after stealing a grubby urchin's last portion of jellied eels".
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