George Osborne and his pimped ride

published 9 October 2014

Until lastweek, we knew little of George Osborne's life outside politics. But a surprisingly frank interview in The Mail on Sunday suggests he's decided to change that.

In it, we learnt, first, that he has lost two stone. His doctor recommended the 5:2 diet, which led to the weight loss: "once you're there, you just have to be careful. I just eat less and go running round the park."

But while his breakfast now consists of a bowl of cereal "with the kids" at about 7am, he enjoys cooking and relaxes by making recipes from Leon, Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson. "Recently I did a Leon Greek lamb dish with tomatoes and olives, slow cooked. It is brilliant."

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From Jamie Oliver's American recipe book, he cooked a dish called "beer-butt chicken". "You roast and put a can of beer up the backside of the chicken." (The recipe didn't impress The Telegraph's Harry Wallop. Beer-butt chicken, he wrote dismissively, has been "a staple of trailer-trash barbecues for decades".)

We also learnt that Osborne has acquired a Bichon Frise puppy, watches The Great British Bake-Off with his 11-year-old daughter Liberty, and had a summer holiday in Derbyshire's Peak District in a campervan.

This last was also Liberty's idea. "She got the idea in her head we should get a pimped-up VW campervan. It was very cool, strawberry coloured. We got instant barbecues from the local supermarket and burgers and sausages and slept in it overnight."

A seriously out-of-whack lifestyle

A year ago, Mohamed El-Erian's ten-year-old daughter gave him a "wake-up call". As CEO of Pimco, a $2trn investment firm, he worked ridiculous hours: on a typical day the alarm went at 2.45am and he'd be at the office by 4.15am, not returning till 7pm, in time for bed at 8.45pm. He had almost no time, he told Worth magazine, for his family.

Then, one evening, a year ago, his daughter handed him a list of 22 key events in her life he'd missed, including her first day at school and a Halloween parade. It dawned that his "work-life balance had gotten way out of whack, and the imbalance was hurting my very special relationship with my daughter".

So the 56-year-old resigned in favour of a"portfolio of part-time roles". Now he drives his daughter to school and picks her up. "She and I are doing a lot of wonderful talking and sharing," he says.

I understand his decision to quit. What puzzles me is why he worked those silly hours in the first place. Mightn't he have been more effective if he'd got up at a sensible time?

Why is corporate America so wedded to the idea that if you have a big job you have to work all the time? On the other hand, El-Erian's business has hundreds of millions under management so he must have done something right.

In August 2013, I wrote that Michael Winner died leaving behind a smaller-than-expected estate of around £4.8m. I now understand this wasn't the case in fact he left net assets of more than £25m. I'm happy to put the record straight.

Tabloid money: flogging rags to thin girls with fat wallets

"All this weeping and wailing, girls anyone would think George Clooney had never been married before," says Tony Parsons in The Sun. But George was married to Talia Balsam before he became famous.

"I won't get married again because I wasn't very good at it,' he said when that relationship ended. No doubt George's marriage to Amal Alamuddin will have a far longer and happier run than the first one. Proof that a man should always marry his second wife first."

"Should we wish Posh Spice's new venture well?" asks Simon English in The Sun. "Her new London store, flogging overprice rags to thin girls with fat wallets, opened this week. On the one hand, there's something offensive about a dress that costs £3,000. On the other, if there are enough vain and absurdly wealthy people to support this business, there are worse places they could send money than to the Beckhams."

"It should have been the speech that saved Britain," says Carole Malone in the Sunday Mirror. "Instead [Ed] Miliband babbled on about some IT bloke called Gareth who he'd met in a park." The speech let everyone down because "our PM in waiting' forgot to mention the two most important issues which are currently blighting the lives of core Labour voters the economy and immigration."

"Call me a cynic but I don't think Ed forgot' those parts of his speech at all," says Rod Liddle in The Sun. I think he knew that "whatever he had to say" on both issues would infuriate either Labour activists or the public.