Here’s a shocking fact. About 70,000 children go to school hungry in a city dripping with the world’s mostly unearned, undeserved, under-taxed, obscene wealth. One in four parents in London worry about being able to feed their children.

Almost a fifth of families in the capital choose between heating their homes or feeding their children, according to the latest research by YouGov, with one in seven families relying on charities and food banks. Even if their children aren’t going hungry, a third of parents feel they can’t afford the healthier food they know they should have. Food charity the Felix Project says, “Hungry children are held back in their development – they don’t do as well at school as their well-fed peers, and are more likely to get into trouble.”

The cuts now raining down yet harder on the poorest were designed by him, and left in place by Theresa May

These latest figures come courtesy of London’s Evening Standard, with its excellent Christmas fundraising campaign to provide food bags for primary school children to take home. But you may recall that the Standard’s editor is George Osborne, who pleads in his editorial: “It is dispiriting that in a prosperous, civilised capital so many children do not eat decent, nutritious meals.” How right he is. Indeed, you might say this can’t possibly be a “civilised” city where so many half-starve.

You Guardian readers likely know this already from our frequent reports – and that the hardship stretches far beyond London. You will have seen the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ projection that by 2020, 36% of children in Britain will have fallen below the official poverty line – under 60% of median income – more than since records began.

The institute can be that precise because the cause is measurably exact: another £12bn was gouged out of the social security budget this April – and it was done with glee and malice by George Osborne. Remember all the abuse he heaped on benefit-scrounging shirkers with their blinds down in the morning – deliberately ignoring the fact he well knew: that most poor families are working, often at two underpaid jobs? If you cut their tax credits, take £2,500 away by shifting them to universal credit, freeze children benefit, lower the threshold for free school meals, remove their education maintenance allowance and shunt them hundreds of miles away by imposing a bedroom tax, they get poorer and hungrier. These cuts, says the IFS, are not nearly compensated for by raising the minimum wage.

Osborne devised a host of tougher benefit restrictions that are currently rolling out, including the rule that only two children in a family now qualify for support. To get support for a third, there is an infamous “rape clause”, where a mother must declare the child was conceived by force – hardly conducive to the currently failing system for getting maintenance from a father, or to the child’s wellbeing as they learn they were never wanted. Iain Duncan Smith, the other deviser of these rules, has four children.

George Osborne was the most deliberately, intentionally, knowingly poverty-causing chancellor of modern times. The cuts now raining down yet harder on the poorest were designed by him, and left in place by Theresa May, for all her crocodile tears for the just-about-managing. Osborne must step over the burgeoning numbers of homeless sleeping rough, who may be grateful for his free newspaper for their bedding.

Now he pleads for charitable donations to relieve the child hunger he helped create. Does the contradiction cross his mind? I looked in vain for his Scrooge editorial, the one where he opens the window on Christmas morning and repents his workhouse usury of the poor, where he saves Tiny Tim and summons the gigantic turkey. Redemption is always possible. He could turn back, declare he was wickedly, mortally wrong, and devote his life to imploring his party to change course.

True, a sackcloth-and-ashes, suffer-little-children transformation might be hard to swallow, but swallow it we would. There is more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner, etc. But no sign. Poll tax architect Michael Portillo similarly enjoys his new persona as a media nice guy, despite his poisonous attacks against people who “live off the state”, while he slashed benefits for the young unemployed and axed the social fund.

For non-Tory remainers, Osborne’s editorship has provided a delightful daily thrill as he lobs one grenade after another at May in revenge for her firing him. He is plainly sincere and serious in his horror at each newly revealed fact about what Brexit will do, as one industry after another starts to count the certain cost of leaving the single market and the customs union.

But poverty? Without a grovelling apology and a Scrooge-repentant commitment to a life-long campaign to reverse the damage he did, his cognitive dissonance – or hypocrisy – defies belief.

• Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist