The irresistible rise of Boy George

A giant inflatable Spiderman doll stands at the bottom of the stairs. Children's toys - trucks, a wooden car and assorted dolls - are piled high in every room of the Victorian terraced home. Radio 4 is humming in the basement kitchen, where a mother pours bowls of Shreddies for her two young children.

Upstairs, their father is putting on a tracksuit and yellow vest top, while listening to Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits. In a few minutes, he will kiss his wife and children goodbye and cycle to work, where he will change into navy-blue Timothy Everest bespoke suit, with a polka-dot tie.

It sounds like an average weekday morning for a middle-class family in this prosperous corner of west London but Spiderman, Bob Dylan and Shreddies are part of the routine of the man tipped to be the saviour of the Tory party.

George Osborne, just 33, who was appointed shadow Chancellor in Michael Howard's front-bench reshuffle this week, has overnight gone from being "George Who?" to "Boy George, Tory Superhero". He is suddenly a household name. The Daily Mail has anointed him "the Tory Tony Blair".

At first sight, Osborne, one of the few stars of the Conservative election campaign, looks like a chip off the traditional "Tory Boy" block.

His father, Sir Peter, is a baronet and boss of the multi-million-pound home-furnishing firm Osborne & Little. George will one day inherit the title - not to mention the small matter of £3 million.

He went to private school - St Paul's in London - and studied modern history at Oxford, where he graduated with a 2:1.

But that's where the connection with high Tory tradition ends. "I'm about as far removed from the Tory knights of the shires as you can get," Osborne says. He is a passionate defender of gay rights. He voted for the repeal of Margaret Thatcher's Section 28 legislation, which sought to ban "the promotion of homosexuality" in schools and he counts half-adozen gay men among his friends.

His target voter is not a businessman or a middle-English family, but a working woman "who lives in the London suburbs and reads the Evening Standard. As she commutes, she worries about money and childcare. She is the voter who sees us as the nasty party".

His British political hero is Tony Blair, whom he first saw when he was sent as an offical Tory observer to Labour's Blackpool conference in 1994.

"I watched him tell his party that they had to dump Clause IV and adjust to modern Britain, not the Britain of the past," he says. "I don't think that the parallels with the Tory party are exact but I do think we need to change to reflect the country as it is now."

Although his parents live in a £5million Notting Hill home and are regulars on the west London society circuit - their dinner guests include the novelist Robert Harris - Osborne himself shuns the social limelight.

He likes to stay in and cook his signature dish, fish stew, for friends. He lives with his wife, Frances, also 33, in a £1 million house in Bayswater, which, he admits, is furnished from top to bottom in Osborne & Little - heavily discounted at 90 per cent, of course.

The couple also have a farmhouse in Osborne's Cheshire constituency, Tatton, which he won in 2001, replacing independent anti-sleaze MP Martin Bell, who stood down.

Frances is a successful writer and the mother of their two children, Liberty, almost two, and Luke, aged three. The pair met at a friend's Sunday lunch party in Sussex in 1997 and got married within a year. "I knew Frances was 'the one' the moment I met her," Osborne says, before insisting: "She is the really amazing person, not me."

The daughter of Tory grandee Lord Howell, Frances worked as a barrister, a journalist and a City analyst before discovering her gift for writing. She writes during the day when Liberty is with the family's nanny and Luke is at nursery. Her first book, Lilla's Feast, based on the life of her great-grandmother who was interned by the Japanese during the Second World War before escaping to Britain, has sold handsomely in America and is about to come out in paperback in Britain.

She has just begun her second book, based on the life of another relative who lived in Kenya's Happy Valley.

"George 'n' Frances's" dinner parties have put the pair at the heart of the so-called Notting Hill Set - the close-knit group of youngish Tory modernisers. Osborne's closest confidants are Right-wing Times columnist Daniel Finkelstein, Tory adviser Rachel Whetstone, advertising guru Steve Hilton, former Times columnist turned Tory MP Michael Gove and David Cameron, appointed Shadow Education Secretary in this week's reshuffle.

Other regular house guests include "my old house chums from Oxford who are mainly journalists, and my brothers".

Osborne has three brothers. Ben, 31, is a graphic designer who lives in Los Angeles, Adam, 29, is a doctor training to be an NHS psychiatrist in a London hospital and Theo, 20, is reading Business Studies at London's European Business School.

Where did Osborne develop his social and political eclecticism?

His mother, Felicity Loxton-Peacock, is of Hungarian origin, and, despite being a debutante, was fiercely Left-wing. She led protest marches against the Vietnam War and young George grew up listening to anti-war songs. Felicity later joined Amnesty International and now runs a food store, Felicitous, on Kensington Park Road.

His father was a Labour-supporting, Chelsea dandy who got married in an Austin Powers-style "swinging baybee" velvet suit in the Sixties before going into business with an outlandish hippy, Antony Little. From a tiny office on the King's Road, the pair established the furnishings business that now counts among its customers the Queen and Bill Clinton.

George's uncle, James, runs London's best- known casino, Aspinall's in Mayfair, which George visits "although I do not gamble".

As a teenager in the 1980s, George Osborne had no interest in politics. While most fiery youngsters sported "Coal not Dole" stickers on their baggy coats, his sole act of teenage rebellion was to change his name. He was born Gideon but switched to George when he was 14 by swearing an oath in front of a solicitor.

"I just did not like the name," he says. "I couldn't think of anyone who I liked or who was successful who was called Gideon, so I changed it to the name of my grandfather who was decorated for his bravery on the western front in World War One."

After driving across the Sahara desert with friends in a Land Rover bought from the British Army, he went to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he ran the student magazine, Isis.

One friend, who shared a house with him, recalls: "Journalism was all he seemed to care about. He wasn't much of a ladies' man and he didn't spend every night getting trolleyed. He was funny and popular but hardly a politico."

When he finally did wake up to politics - after a brief stint working for the Times and the Daily Telegraph - he picked the worst possible time.

"I joined the Tory party and got a job in central office in 1992 and spent the next few years watching everything that could go wrong, go wrong - Black Wednesday, sleaze scandals and the 1997 electoral wipe-out."

But that was then. Even though they have just lost the election, the Tories are daring to believe in themselves again.

Now all they need is a new leader when Michael Howard steps down later this year. Osborne and his friend David Cameron have been tipped as "the Brown and Blair of the Tory Party". It's an analogy Osborne finds flattering.

"There are," he concedes, "certain parallels. The party needs to wake up to the realities of the 21st century, much like Labour needed to rouse itself from its ideological slumbers in the 1980s."

Others find it infuriating. Critics complain that Osborne is too Bertie Woosterish, too privileged to be a modernising Tory leader, let alone one who could pull off the kind of reforms Tony Blair has wrought in his party.

He laughs off the claims. "I don't have some sort of story about being the son of a miner," he says. "But I'd like to think I have an understanding of modern society through being brought up in London."

He denies he is the 25th wealthiest Tory MP - "I wish" - and reminds detractors that, as a senior speechwriter and special adviser, he worked alongside John Major in Downing Street and was in on every major decision William Hague made as leader of the opposition.

There's no doubt Osborne would like to be prime minister one day. So, as a first step, will he stand in the party leadership elections scheduled for later this year? He has told friends it is unlikely but few believe him. "It's more than a possibility," one close shadow Cabinet colleague says.

If he gets his way, "Meet the Osbornes" will no longer be just the cult reality TV show, it will be the compelling drama of Britain's first family.

Scene One: The Prime Minister walks down the corridors of Number 10 Downing Street, freshly redecorated in Osborne & Little wallpaper. He pours himself and his children bowls of Shreddies, puts Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits on the CD player and dons his navy Timothy Everest suit, offset with a polka-dot tie.