From London, Sarah Lyall (for some reason) covered a debate pitting candidates for Chancellor of the Exchequer, the rough equivalent of the Treasury Secretary in the United States, in Tuesday's "British Candidate Debate Hard Choices on Finances [1]," and managed to work in another bit [2] of anti-Conservative bias.
[George] Osborne, who looks preternaturally young and sleek, had to prove that he is not too callow and inexperienced to run the nation's finances. As the privileged son of a baronet and an important figure in the Conservative Party, which has traditionally been allied with wealth and elitism, he also had to show that he understood the pain of the common man. To that end, he repeated several times that "we're all in this together."
Last week Lyall claimed [3] the Conservative Party in Britain needed to be dragged away from its "old chilly image as a stuffy bastion of the elite, the mean-spirited, the entitled and the clueless."
To be fair, in Tuesday's article one of the Conservative's two liberal opponents also suffered a swipe from Lyall, though it was more personal than ideological:
For his part, Mr. Cable of the Liberal Democrats had to prove that he is not, as one television commentator called him, the political equivalent of Chance, the simple-minded gardener in the movie "Being There," whose statements of the obvious are greeted as profound philosophical utterances. But he gets most political mileage from being a plain speaker of unpalatable truths, and he drew applause and laughter when he pointed out exaggerations or obfuscations by his opponents.