Mr. Osborne nearly went to Washington

Handing one of the plushest jobs in world diplomacy — UK ambassador to Washington — to the architect of austerity probably isn’t what any Labour voters had on their bingo card, but that’s exactly what senior advisers to Keir Starmer were pushing for in December.

Writing today in The New World, Keir Starmer biographer Tom Baldwin reveals the entreaty to former Tory chancellor George Osborne was very serious — and that the former chancellor was very much up for it.

The senior advisers “invested considerable effort in unsuccessfully pushing the former Tory chancellor’s application,” Tom reveals.

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It was not to be. Ultimately, the job went to Peter Mandelson, who succeeded Dame Karen Pierce into the Edwin Lutyens-designed ambassador’s residence at 3100 Massachusetts Avenue — the subject of a recent £120m makeover.

Had Osborne been successful, it would have been the pièce de résistance on a quite extraordinary roll call of jobs since the 54-year-old left office as part of the Cameron government that brought us Brexit — including his current position as chair of the British Museum and previous spells as editor of the London Evening Standard and a lucrative gig as advisor to asset manager BlackRock.

He has, however, tasted disappointment before — failing in his 2019 bid to head the International Monetary Fund, and the chair of the BBC position, for which he was touted in 2020, was reportedly too low a salary (a mere £160,000) to get him out of bed.