Osborne’s university friend Peter Davies was his best man

Davies’ hedge fund bought £50m share now worth nearly £86m

Lansdowne Partners made £100m from financial crash

Ex-boss given knighthood after £500,000 Tory donation

George Osborne’s best man heads up a hedge fund which has secured profits of £36m from the privatisation of Royal Mail in under six months — £210,000 for each day since the sale in October last year.

The chancellor’s university friend Peter Davies sits on the management committee of Lansdowne Partners, which snapped up shares at the offer price of just 330p. They are now trading at 564p — a whopping 70% higher.

The government has been slammed today by the National Audit Office for an under-priced sale which saw City firms walk off with two-thirds of the public asset while 40,000 ordinary individual investors were excluded:

“The department [of Business and Skills] was very keen to achieve its objective of selling Royal Mail, and was successful in getting the company listed on the FTSE 100”

“Its approach, however, was marked by deep caution, the price of which was borne by the taxpayer.”

With one fund manager telling Radio 4 that the postal service “was significantly underpriced”, business minister Michael Fallon will be hoping we’ve forgotten about this gem from last April:

“I can state categorically that we have no intention of selling off Royal Mail cheaply.

“We will sell shares in Royal Mail at a fair commercial price that represents value for money for the tax payer.”

In other news, Lansdowne’s former chief exec was awarded a knighthood in 2012 after donating £500,000 to the Conservative Party.