Fraser Nelson is a Times columnist and a former editor of The Spectator.
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Has somebody stolen the Tory Party? A stranger walking around here would have no idea that its their conference. The word “Conservative” or “Tory” is nowhere to be seen. Just a slogan, “Together in the national interest” – a form of words that Cameron has repeatedly used to describe the coalition. As I say in
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I have found out a little more about the Universal Credit – and how the arguments over the summer were resolved. First, the backdrop. Money was always going to be a problem. This policy is about saving lives, not money. Right now, we pave the road to welfare dependency, creating a vacuum in the labour
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Cameron and Osborne may just be about to pull off something incredible. This time last year, The Spectator ran a cover story about a new proposal which we could revolutionise welfare: the Universal Credit. It was an IDS idea: he’d sweep away all 50-odd benefits, and replace it with a system that ran on a
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What’s at the heart of the row over defence funding? George Osborne hinted at it today when he told the Telegraph that “frankly, of all the budgets I have seen, the defence budget was the one that was the most chaotic, the most disorganised, the most overcommitted”. The problem is that during the Labour years, various accounting
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Fraser Nelson reviews the week in politics At Labour party conference in Manchester last week, David Miliband’s supporters could be spotted at 20 paces. They were the ones walking around in a daze, still not quite able to take in what had happened. They felt that their man had not so much lost as been
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I had expected Ed Miliband to do pretty well in the polls. He’s unknown, and voters haven’t had a chance to dislike him yet. That’s not an insult – familiarity breeds contempt in politics, and the public are normally quite quick to give a new guy the benefit of the doubt. Witness the Clegg bubble.
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David Miliband’s logic is difficult to fault. If he stayed, he would be treated as the torch bearer for those disgruntled Labour members who feel they were robbed. Without him, such people have no one to turn to. New Labour will now dissolve. ‘Progress’ – supposedly for the next generation of Blairites – held their
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So did Liam Fox leak the letter? Only if he is suicidal. He’s been around long enough (having been a frontbencher from the Major years onwards) to know how the game works. Briefing journalists is one thing, leaking a private letter is utterly counterproductive. It will make it harder for him to get the settlement
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David Miliband is a tease. The speech he just gave was one of his best: it was self-deprecating, had gravitas, humour, and he spoke down to the Tories, telling William Hague what statesmanship was about. A monstrous conceit, CoffeeHousers may argue, but a Labour leader needs a bit of that; to make out that he’s
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I knew that David Miliband had lost the moment I saw him walk in the room, smiling like Michael Portillo on election night 1997. And when I saw Ed Balls look of pure murder: his enemy had won. Time to destroy. We saw a tension in this result: the MPs and members leaned towards David,
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Fraser Nelson reviews the week in politics For decades, conservatives have played an important role in Swedish politics: they are there to be defeated. They advocate lower taxes, and are duly accused of planning savage cuts. So the voters traditionally stick with the Social Democrats who have held power for seven of the last eight
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A few weeks ago, I wrote a cover story about how teachers’ unions are trying to strangle the Gove schools agenda at birth. But I fear it is facing an even greater, more immediate threat: basic bungling by government departments. The FT today says that the Department of Transport wants to make sure that local
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I ration my writing about Sweden. As CoffeeHousers know, I can extol its virtues with room-emptying conviction. But it’s now a few days since its election, and as far as I can tell no English publication has told the extraordinary story of its conservative victory – and the economic turnaround driven by the largest tax
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What are we to make of the fact that No.10 gave the thumbs-up to Vince Cable’s bizarre anti-capitalist rhetoric today? “Capitalism takes no prisoners and it kills competition where it can,” he fumed – and you can argue that, technically, he is paraphrasing Adam Smith. But he has been in politics long enough to know
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Nick Clegg is making life horribly difficult for those of us on the right who spent the last few things portraying him as a figure of fun. He is now delivering the best speeches of anyone in the Cabinet, characterised by a quiet sense of urgency and direction. He’s in the business of making the
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The most brutal session the Lib Dems will see is the studio audience currently assembled by Victoria Derbyshire for her Five Live phone-in. It’s a rare event in conference time, where the general public are put into contact with the politicians. The result is normally a bit of a bear pit, and for that reason
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So where will the tension be at the Lib Dem conference? Easy: the free schools agenda. Clegg backs it, and when David Laws took over the agenda he backed Gove’s market-based reform. But the teaching unions are in a fight to the death against it. The Gove agenda would put power in the hands of
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If Nick Clegg was a weak-willed, crowd-pleasing charlatan the the front page of yesterday’s Independent would not have read “Clegg: there is no future for the Lib Dems as a left party”. Turning up to a Lib Dem conference and saying there’s no point in being a party of lefty protesters is like William Shatner
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You may notice that today’s Spectator looks a little different. We have updated our design, introducing some new features and bringing back some old ones. I suspect that a good number of our readers will not really notice the new design as such – just, I hope, that the magazine looks better. As ConservativeHome says,
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What is it about the British and flag waving? I ask after watching last night’s superlative BBC Proms, a brilliant end to the best season for years. On HD and wired to the hifi, it was all the better. As the end approached, my Czech mother-in-law asked: if this is Britain’s flagship musical event, why
