Is Osborne flicking his tail over euro rescue plans?

I hear that Tory special advisers who attended the pep talk with the prime minister at Number 10 this week were told they will now get “360 degree appraisals” from senior civil servants who work with them.

One cabinet minister told me he thought his special advisers should be getting a panning from their civil servants if they’re doing their job properly…he seemed to think the whole idea was barking and that a senior civil servant had been feeding daft ideas into the prime minister’s ear.

While the No 10 chat was going on, George Osborne slipped out of Downing Street for dinner with the “No Turning Back” group of right-wing Tory MPs. My source tells me he got quite a pasting from MPs unhappy with the chancellor’s position supporting closer union for the 17 in the euro (and presumably for the other eight who in theory are committed to joining them).

One Cabinet minister tells me that George Osborne feels he has to support closer economic union because he mustn’t look like he’s undermining the fragile state of the euro. So why, the French must be wondering (see the Financial Times p3 today), does he persist in mentioning France in the same breath as the highly indebted eurozone countries the markets have on suicide watch?

Could it be he is still flicking his tail after his plans at the G20 for an IMF safety net to give markets confidence were torpedoed and the French and Germans upped their demands for a financial transaction tax?