• e-mail

With razor-sharp wit and outrageous personal insight, her profiles of Boris Johnson and David Cameron have already proved essential reading in Westminster and beyond.

This week, Petronella Wyatt turns her unflinching gaze to George Osborne and Michael Gove, Chancellor and Justice Secretary, and the final two figures in the quartet of Conservatives leading the In-Out Europe debate that’s convulsing Britain.

As she reveals, both men are ambitious, passionate, and in the case of one, incurably romantic...

Scroll down for video 

Petronella Wyatt gets up close and very personal in her final installment of the pulsating profile of Cameron's rivals

It was the night the future of the Conservative Party was decided. It had been an unforgiving August day in Italy, the sort of day when the sun blanches everything white. Peter and Felicity Osborne were expected to dinner with their son George. 

The Osbornes were family friends. My mother is Hungarian and Felicity half-so, and they had first met in the 1960s. 

Peter Osborne, a hereditary baronet, had founded the successful soft furnishings company Osborne & Little. George I hardly knew, despite our having attended the same London prep school, Norland Place.

When the Osbornes arrived I was stirring a jug of Errol Flynn’s favourite cocktail – part gin, part Cointreau, part lemon juice – under the supervision of another guest who had been taught it by Flynn. It was infernally hot. 

The men had stripped off their jackets and ties, but I recall that George was wearing black socks. On so young a man they seemed somehow odd, especially on such a warm night. George was head of politics at the Conservative Research Department, but was only in his mid-20s.

‘My girlfriend couldn’t come,’ he said apologetically. ‘She has sunstroke. I think I have a touch of it myself.’ He was perspiring horribly and I gave him an Evian water spray and wrung out a napkin in iced water which he used to mop his face.

I put on a disc of Charles Trenet singing La Mer and George began to revive, slowly tapping his feet in time to the beat.

We sat down to eat – a frothy saffron risotto – and my father began to reminisce about his friendship with Mahatma Gandhi. I noticed that George was a listener, with a cobra alertness. Generations of baronets had given him a natural look of superiority, which he contradicted with a shy, beguiling smile which was all his own.

When my father said that Gandhi was the first world leader to adopt deliberately an informal approach to dress, George’s overtly intelligent eyes became laser lights. 

Younger days: Petronella Wyatt first met a young George Osborne during a dinner while on holiday in Italy

Though Gandhi was a professional lawyer and a member of a high Indian caste, he had decided it would be more effective if he stopped wearing a suit and went about in a loincloth. He liked it when Churchill called him ‘a half-naked fakir’ because it made him seem ‘oppressed’ and a man of the people.

At the time of our meeting, the Tory Party was at the height of its ‘Nasty Party’ reputation and everyone wore suits and ties.

‘What a brilliant idea!’ George exclaimed. ‘Conservative MPs can look much too formal and the electorate can’t relate to them. They need a more sympathetic image.’

This, then, was the night that tie-less Conservatism was born. Though I doubt George went as far as to suggest to David Cameron that Tories should be as naked as Gandhi (one would not like to imagine Nicholas Soames in a loincloth).

I liked George in a way I never liked David. Their private personalities are in direct contrast to their public ones. On a political stage, David is more commanding; not only clever, but sometimes deceptively charming, while George can seem as stiff as a martinet.

In private, however, George is a gossip par excellence, amusing even. He appreciates opera and is a scholar of Americana. Yet he can be sensitive to pricks and stings, and in his personality there are flashes of darkness.

To understand the Chancellor, you must understand what it is to be partly Hungarian. He first became interested in politics, aged 13 or 14, when his mother described the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, which was put down with harsh brutality. George has little of the Anglo-Saxon about him and much of the Magyar.

His complexion is eastern, with the fish-belly pallor of Vlad the Impaler. His eyes have a Mongolian slant and his voice the twang of a gipsy’s zither. He is quick-tempered and, unlike most privately educated Englishmen, enjoys the company of women. His wife, Frances, who is a popular novelist with hair like a winter sunset, leads an independent life and her husband is often left at home, cooking a passable sort of lasagne.

Chancellor George Osborne first became interested in politics, aged 13 or 14, when his mother described the Hungarian Uprising of 1956

I believe, however, it was I who first told our now matador-hipped hotshot of a Chancellor that he had sex appeal. After that night in Italy, we kept in touch and a few weeks later met for lunch at the fashionable Ivy restaurant in London’s West End. George and I sat catty-corner on a banquette. 

He had a sort of Huckleberry Finn charm. Even his clothes were not those of his trade. His trousers were baggy, like those of a Turkish eunuch. He had a child’s eye for colour and wore a pink shirt. In those days his abundant hair curled around his head, forming a sort of airy cap.

He smelt of old-fashioned soap and had an androgynous quality – Olivier had it, so did the young Brando. I told him so and he giggled hysterically. That moment of laughter was a bond; a shared part of our youth.

Later, he invited me to lunch at Aspinall’s, the London private member’s club and gambling establishment. George is immune to the mechanical vices, however, and it was I who lost money. I asked him what he wanted to do after the Conservative Research Department.

‘I’d like to be an MP,’ he replied.

‘Just an MP? Why not Prime Minister?’

Spots of colour appeared on his wintry cheeks. ‘I am not sure I’m as ambitious as that.’

In 2001 George became the youngest MP in the House of Commons, and later Shadow Chancellor.

Now he is a Prime Minister manqué. One of his defects as a politician is that it is difficult to like him if you don’t know him, whereas David is easy to like until you do.

George Osborne, pictured with David Cameron, once admitted to Petronella that he was not 'ambitious' enough to become Prime Minister 

There is a quality to George that eludes happiness; a consciousness of his limitations. Sometimes he wears the agonised look of a man who knows he has made mistakes – mistakes that are perhaps unforgivable in man who aspires to be premier.

First there was the Oleg Deripaska affair in Corfu, when he is said to have approached the Russian oligarch for funds. And there have been serious lapses since, indicating an inability to comprehend the Tory voter.

There was the ‘omnishambles’ Budget of 2012, last year’s Autumn Statement which proposed cutting the working tax credit, and his recent Death In Venice of a Budget that prompted the near-catastrophic resignation of Iain Duncan Smith.

We all have a moment in our lives when our future seems perilous. That moment came to George four years ago when he was booed in London’s Olympic Stadium. He was not only outraged by this assault on his integrity, but beset by anxiety. His supporters were equally dismayed, in particular his chief of staff, a lithe and determined young woman called Thea Rogers.

George Osborne's desire to rule seems almost counterfeit and sits uneasily with his nature

It was Rogers who enrolled him in the Westminster school of charm. George was put on the 5:2 diet, his head was shorn, and a personal trainer sculpted and moulded him into an Alcibiades reborn. Rogers began to choose his shirts and accompany him to parties, doubtless to ensure his conversation was equally co-ordinated.

His beau ideal is Henry VII, the first Tudor king of England. It’s an odd choice. Henry Tudor, who spent the first half of his life in exile, was a coward who hid behind his men at Bosworth; a man who executed women, imprisoned and murdered the ten-year-old Earl of Warwick, and was so disliked that he travelled in a closed litter under guard.

But the Winter King, as he is known, was a man of solid achievement; a survivor who brought order after a century of bloody civil war; a consummate manager of the nation’s finances and a man who realised, long before Francis Bacon, that longevity in politics rests not on popularity but on fear and respect. 

But George’s desire to rule seems almost counterfeit and sits uneasily with his nature. He is industrious and clever, but he is not a star of magnitude and no cosmetic alteration can change that.

When he stepped aside to allow Cameron to stand for the leadership, it was not an entirely unselfish gesture. He confided to intimates that he had disturbing dreams and that one night he watched one of Shakespeare’s history plays and seeing all the assassinations and plots decided it was ‘a bad omen’.

Is this the result of a flaw in the man; the emotional lacuna that causes him to see life with the mind of an understudy, in contrast to Boris Johnson who is a natural star?

George is also known as ‘the submarine’, a man who sinks below the water to avoid being hit. In the crude EU In-Out circus, he has been showing a sort of fineness, or distaste for its boxing ring vulgarity. His chances of becoming Tory leader seem evanescent. Among Tory MPs he is referred to as ‘the late George Osborne’.

I doubt he would be happy as Prime Minister. I believe he is a man in self-denial, who has pushed himself into thinking he is capable of seizing the Tory crown from larger men. He would do well to remember that Henry VII suffered from severe depression and were he alive today he would probably be in The Priory.

Over time I have known politicians who are professional back-stabbers, but the unselfish variety is by far the rarer species. Michael Gove is not only unselfish but unspoiled.

It was 1994 and a late summer evening at the modish River Cafe in West London, where I was having supper with friends. I cannot remember why, but I was in an odious mood when Michael, who was then comment editor of The Times, walked in. ‘Hello, Petsy,’ he said, regardless of the fact that I loathe being called Petsy.

I gave him my special melt-down-and-die-look. It had little effect, perhaps because he had taken off his horn-rimmed glasses. Michael has always been near-sighted and his eyes, which are lilac and dewy like Elizabeth Taylor’s, often seem on the point of tears.

‘I’ve just finished my biography of Michael Portillo,’ he continued. Portillo was then Defence Secretary and a potential Tory leader.

‘Oh, yes,’ I replied rudely.

Michael smiled. ‘Would you like to have dinner sometime?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Would you like to go to the theatre with me?’

‘No.’ This would have given a lesser man pause, but he went on: ‘OK. Would you like a lift anyway?’

He reacted without a scintilla of irritation. There was barely a flicker of recognition that the conversation had gone badly; maybe no recognition at all. He has never once mentioned the episode and doubtless erased it from his mind.

Among the quartet of leading Conservatives I have profiled over the past weeks, Michael is the changeling, the adopted Scottish boy who went to a state primary and won a scholarship to Oxford. Yet he rivals Boris in diversity. Gove is a prose stylist, a consummate satirist, a Wagnerian and a connoisseur of obscure novels and political tracts.

Though Michael Gove was not born into privilege, his manners are as courtly as those of any prince

He is an intellectual but his physical capabilities are those of a child. The most elementary facts about the visible universe alarm him. He can barely drive a car and he cannot thread a needle. He has a head of a gallon capacity but he is the sort of impractical idealist who, on noticing a rose smells better than a carrot, concludes that it will also make a better soup.

Though not born into privilege, his manners are as courtly as those of any prince. But for a cause in which he believes, he becomes like one of the late Eugene Terre’Blanche’s famous Dobermans, foaming at the mouth and baring his gums.

He recoils physically at the mention of the EU and his language reflects this. Michael recently announced that Europe ‘fuels terror and fascism’. He wrote that it also imposes poverty, and that it is ‘immoral’ of David Cameron to wish to remain part of it.

Had he lived in the late 19th Century, Michael might have been a Russian anarchist, throwing bombs at tsars. He keeps a photograph of Lenin in his office at the Justice Department.

I first encountered Michael when I was 21. I was working on the Telegraph and he was employed by The Times.

I started to see him more often after he attempted to organise a kind of youth movement on behalf of Michael Portillo. Others included Ed Vaizey (now Culture Minister), Rachel Whetstone and Steve Hilton (both in Cameron’s inner circle pre-Downing Street). After I joined The Spectator as deputy editor in the 1990s, Michael became a frequent guest of the magazine. We lunched together often. In those days, he would eat no other vegetables except potatoes, even in the height of summer.

On one occasion it was stifling and while I ate some cold meats with salad, he insisted on large dollops of mash. I asked him if he had Irish blood. ‘Not that I know of,’ he said. ‘I just don’t like funny vegetables.’

It became evident that Michael’s impulses were almost entirely generous. When a friend or an acquaintance is in trouble, he responds. He also offers practical help and will continue to inquire after that person’s wellbeing.

On one occasion we had attended the same party. I left early and as I sought a taxi on the empty streets of West London, two youths rushed at me from behind, knocking me down and making off with my handbag. Michael emerged. When I explained what had happened, he refused to carry on to his business dinner until he had given me some money and put me in a taxi. He does not forget his friends.

His loyalty to George, with whom he has been friends since the early 1990s, is unshakeable. Michael and his wife Sarah have been frequent guests at Dorneywood, the Chancellor’s country residence, and there is both an emotional and intellectual affinity. They have similar tastes and interests but it is Michael who, like Boris, can exhibit traits that mark him out as a ‘gentleman’ and a man of honour.

Liking to be liked, in common with other adopted children, he is a natural consigliere. When his friend Cameron entered Parliament in 2001, Michael decided he would be David’s. When Cameron decided to run for the Tory leadership, Michael provided support through his articles in The Times. He was not only a foot soldier, but the heavy artillery.

He gave Cameron a degree of gravitas. He provided him with jokes. You might even say he made him likeable. It is one of Cameron’s great defects that he has failed to appreciate Michael Gove. When Cameron decided to remove Gove from Education, he denied him the traditional courtesy of telling him beforehand. Michael was upset.

What was really behind his breakneck decision to defy Cameron at last, and join the group of Cabinet Ministers declaring for Brexit? Was it an irresistible impulse for revenge? There is fury in Michael, but like Boris, he bears no malice.

Knowing Michael, his decision was that of an intensely passionate man who finds himself in a situation that is intolerable; the revolt of a free soul. It was also a decision worthy of the calculation of a Tyrion, the Game Of Thrones character whom Michael most admires.

If Brexit wins, Michael is unstoppable and a senior post beckons. If Remain wins, Cameron would not dare crush a man who has gained such a reputation for integrity.