Fraser Nelson is a Times columnist and a former editor of The Spectator.
Good old Alistair Darling is on manouevres again. Normally, Chancellors stay quiet before the Budget but he has admitted to the Sunday Times that there will not (surprise, surprise) be an economic recovery starting in July as he predicted last October. “We must be realistic about this,” he says. “I think it will be the
The figure Gordon Brown will have been waiting for is now in: the post G20 bounce. He’s reduced the Tory lead to 7 points ( from 10 points pre-G20) with Labour up a modest three points to 34% according to a YouGov poll published in the Sunday Times tomorrow. The Tories are at 41% and
For the last 15 years, a four-letter word has terrified and paralysed the Conservative leadership: cuts. When it has been deployed by Gordon Brown on the electoral battlefield, the Tories have had no defence. Even after they surrendered and signed up to Labour’s spending plans, Mr Brown still accused them of planning ‘deep and painful
Eric Pickles says his Question Time disaster last week was a “car crash” which has changed his views on MPs expenses. He opens his heart to Andrew Neil in Straight Talk, being shown on BBC News Channel this weekend. “You’re just trying to steer away and the more I tried to steer away the worse
Britain has as its Prime Minister a master of political illusion. He may not be much of an orator, but there is no one better at dressing up old money as new. If the G20 nations wanted to fake progress, to spin a $1.1 trillion figure while committing no new money at all, then Gordon
For most of the 15 years, an orthodoxy has governed Westminster: that cuts are bad, and that higher state spending – sorry, “investment” – is good. While the Tories stayed mute, Gordon Brown embarked on the biggest explosion of state spending in the developed world. As I say in my column today, only the oddballs
How Brown must have loved reading out his day’s business at PMQs: meeting with President Obama, then his counterparts from Russia, China and Japan. For months, he will have been dreaming about today like a four-year-old dreams about Christmas. All the world leaders, all here in London – and Brown playing the statesman. Then Edward
Given that Jacqui Smith is almost certainly toast, who will replace her? I’m dismayed to hear James Purnell’s name mentioned – dismayed because we need him doing welfare reform, and because the Home Office is the graveyard of political ambition. I’d quite like Purnell around long enough to be Opposition leader, keeping Cameron on his
Why are so many intelligent people taken in by the climate change argument? I have long (and genuinely) suspected I’m missing something. So I tuned in to Start The Week to hear Sir Nicholas Stern back with a new book on climate change – which (surprise, surprise) he says has grown far worse since he
Might the collapse of Dunfermline Building Society turn into a political scandal? Tonight, Channel Four news has an interview with Jim Faulds, its chairman, who appears to be saying the Treasury have been lying about him. He didn’t want a bail out, he says, just a £20m loan (the spin had been that he wanted
As Brown left Argentina, he might have thought “at least nothing else can go wrong now.” After all, Dan Hannan had started a Mexican wave of derision with his now-famous speech in Strasbourg; then Brown was introduced in New York as a man who became PM in 2007 “and it was all downhill ever since”;
To comprehend the scale of the sickening task awaiting George Osborne if he becomes chancellor, consider the following. If he were to raise VAT to 25 per cent, double corporation tax, close the Foreign Office, cancel all international aid, disband the army and the police, release all prisoners, close every school and abolish unemployment benefit
For a while it looked like Brown was about to go to a country without some comic mishap. But he didn’t let us down. Michelle Bachelet, the Chilean President, noted at her joint press conference with Brown how her government had been able to introduce a significant fiscal stimulus because of their “decision during …
I was on the Today programme this morning (here) defending bankers, up against Michael Meacher who has drafted a private members’ bill imposing a punitive retrospective tax on bonuses. This, of course, is simply vengeance – the political equivalent of smashing Fred Goodwin’s windows. And for such a bill to be even before Parliament sends
Seeing Fred the Shred’s house being trashed in Edinburgh gives a glimpse of the nastier elements of the hang-a-banker mood out there – not just in Britain but internationally. Here is a remarkable opportunity for the Conservatives. World over, there are votes to be gained in threatening to tax or regulate the bejesus out of
Is the Government about to go pop? If Britain does go to the IMF it would be because the Government fails to find buyers for its debt. And this morning, for the first time in seven years, this happened. It could be a one-off, it could be for technical reasons as yet undisclosed. But given
I had a text a while ago saying “you doing Gordon Brown’s work for him then?” and that was from someone who had not the seen graphic which the News of the World designed to go with my column today. I know many CoffeeHousers will take it as prima facie case of treason, but I’m
It has taken five months but George Osborne has finally fallen into the trap Gordon Brown set for him when he proposed a new 45p tax on the richest. Without prompting on The Today programme this morning, Osborne said: “If you look at the proposal to increase the top rate of tax for people earning
Once a week, about half of the Cabinet make the rather pointless journey into an underground bunker in Whitehall to learn just how quickly the British economy is disintegrating. This is all to humour Gordon Brown, who calls them his ‘National Economic Council’ and has them meet in the nuclear-proof room as if they were
One of the biggest dangers posed by the credit crunch is the instinct to introduce regulations that would stifle any economic recovery. Those whose memories only really cover the boom years might think the mistake was light-touch regulation and that you now need heavier regulation. That’s why the debates in the Lords on this subject
