Monday, September 12, 2011

Dates, please

There's more than a little confusion about who did what when in the claims and counter-claims of Chancellor George Osborne and ex-dominatrix Natalie Rowe, who has today repeated her story that George used cocaine in her company.

George graduated in Modern History from Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1993.  Somewhere along the line, he spent a "semester" as a Dean Rusk scholar at Davidson College, North Carolina.  The Osborne biography at the Conservative Party says, after a short spell as a freelance journalist, he joined the Conservative Research Department in 1994.  Other sources say before he joined the CRD, he spent some time as a data entry assistant in the NHS, recording death details for London; and worked at Selfridges; others say he "missed out on a position at a national newspaper" (despite having been joint editor of Isis at Oxford).

The photograph of Natalie and George together first emerged in October 2005; she'd sold it to the Sunday Mirror, but the same story spookily appeared in the News of The World (she now thinks her mobile phone may have been tapped by Glenn Mulcaire). George told the Mirror then "Twelve years ago a friend …went out with a woman called Natalie and they had a child together. I met them together occasionally in the autumn of 1993, and it soon became clear that my friend had started to use drugs. He became more and more addicted and I saw his life fall apart" In a later statement, George said "The allegations are completely untrue and dredging up a photo from when I was 22 years old is pretty desperate stuff. This is merely part of an absurd smear campaign". That would fix the photo between May 1993 and May 1994.

Natalie's story today says the photograph was from 1994, taken at a party to celebrate news of her pregnancy; the father to be was William "Sincs" Sinclair, a Bristol University graduate, who'd met Osborne through mutual friends. Natalie's child was born in September that year, which might put the date of the photo to January.  Natalie's line today "I mean it’s been said in the newspapers that he [George] was at university. He wasn’t. At the time he was working for William Hague. I remember that vividly because he called William Hague insipid and I didn’t know what the word meant. I do now. So he definitely was in government by then but I think he was getting more and more of a high profile. So there was definitely, there was cocaine on that night on the table. George Osborne did take cocaine on that night. And not just on that night. He took it on a regular basis with me, with his friends".

This can't all be right. At the time of the photo George may have been working for the CRD, but he wasn't directly employed by William Hague until 1997, with the Tories in Opposition; in 1993/4 Hague was in junior roles at the Department of Social Security.  It's possible, however, he was rude about Hague (another Magdalen graduate) en passant in Rowe's company.

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