Frances Osborne is one half of Britain’s most sought after couples. The flame-haired Oxford-educated author is married to George Osborne, 38, Britain’s youthful “shadow” chancellor with whom she has two children,
Luke, eight, and Liberty, six.
If the opinion polls are proved right, and the young
conservatives led by David Cameron, 42, win the general
election next spring, then in all likelihood, probably around
May, the Osbornes will be swapping their cozy Notting Hill
home for Number 11 Downing Street, the official home for
Britain’s leading finance minister, or “chancellor” as the
British call the position that is equivalent to the U.S. treasury
secretary but is, in reality, far more prominent. So 11
Downing is adjacent to Number 10 Downing, home of the
prime minister and the equivalent of America’s White House.
Cameron, whose glamorous wife Samantha is the creative
director of leather goods retailer, Smythson, and Osborne
have brought the British Conservative Party out of the
wilderness and back to relevance. Both the Camerons and the
Osbornes are now political celebrities in Britain, where the
leaders of the “shadow” government—like America’s
minority party but more powerful—appear on the lively,
sometimes raucous, weekly televised parliamentary debates
known as “Prime Minister’s Questions,” where every bill
proposed by the government minister standing on his or her
feet gets fiercely torn apart by his or her “shadow” minister
who delivers a counter-proposal.
Since 1997, the conservatives, under various leaders, failed
to make much of a mark in these sessions—especially while
Labour, under the leadership of the charismatic Clintonesque
Tony Blair, was on a roll with policies that felt more modern
and in tune with a Britain that was increasingly dominated by
a growing middle class whose voice was louder and more
nuanced than what had preceded it. (Previously, the national
political debate had been, generally speaking, a polarized
