Fraser Nelson is a Times columnist and a former editor of The Spectator.
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All of us in 22 Old Queen Street are admiring the New Statesman this week, guest edited by Alastair Campbell. He’s evidently put a hell of a lot of work into it and ransacked his contacts book: diary by Sarah Brown, interview with Alex Ferguson (Pete, a dedicated Man Utd fan, says it’s one of
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Is there such a thing as the collective wisdom of Coffee House? By the end of The Spectator Inquiry into the recession, we’ll find out. It’s now live and with its own wiki site – http://spectatorinquiry.pbwiki.com. We’re very much playing this by ear, so I’d be grateful if a few CoffeeHousers could head over there,
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This is not even the end of the beginning. Unemployment is rising at the fastest rate since monthly records began, but it will keep rising for two more years. Every month we’ll get this. Every month, Cameron will say “your ‘help’ isn’t working,” and every month he’ll be right. I have two graphs below that
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After PMQs, the burning question around Westminster is this: did Cameron overstep the mark when he shouted at Brown, “What a phoney”? Good point well made, I thought, but to other kinder souls it may come across as a bit harsh. Alan Johnson talks about Cameron coming across like Harry Flashman at times. That’s because
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My, but David Cameron was good today. Assertive, contemptuous, energetic and all over Gordon Brown. Today’s unemployment rise is the highest since records began (in 1972) so he had plenty of ammo. His point was strong and simple: nothing Brown has done is working. Unemployment is getting worse, all the time. Did this not show how
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As I type, David Cameron is in the Boothroyd Room, in Portcullis House, addressing Tory MPs who are anxious to hear if his Big Sorry on Friday amounts to a change in direction. True in the Cameroon spirit of open information, I’m being sent some dispatches in real time. Whether it’s interpretation or verbatim quotes isn’t clear: I’ll
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So the winning question to David Cameron was Rhoda Klapp’s “Give me five good reasons to vote tory”. It chimes with our winning 2009 resolution for Cameron: “To resolve to produce 5 core reasons to vote Conservative which every British voter is familiar with by the next election”. And his answer? 1) Get rid of
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So just how sorry is David Cameron? On Friday he put his hands up to being part of a “cosy consensus” on tax and spending. So I had expected his press conference today to declare he’d torn up his plans to outspend what he inherits from Labour. All bets are off, I expected him to
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So what would you ask David Cameron after his apology on Friday? It’s his press conference at 12.15pm today and I’m going along. If any CoffeeHousers have thoughts on a good question, let’s have them…
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Might Alistair Darling prove to be a hero of the Labour endgame? When he was first appointed, I argued that he’d be a puppet – “no more a Chancellor than Captain Scarlet was an actor”. I have since heard plenty of stories to the contrary: that he is doing a pretty good job saving taxpayers
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The right to keep one’s political affiliation secret is in many eyes a sacred feature of British life. There are households where married couples don’t tell each other how they vote. Those who grew up during the Cold War era remember the years when, in some countries, party membership was a grim prerequisite of a
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So Cameron said come out and said sorry. Again. The first stage of his S-Word was that apology on the Andrew Marr Show which was interrupted when the signal from North Kensington collapsed. Today he said…. “Of course I’m sorry that we have got some things wrong, we were right to call time on government debt
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As I suspected, opinion amongst CoffeeHousers is divided as to whether RBS asking potential clients for their political affiliation is a big deal. A good chunk of you think this is a scandal. Others don’t. Where, they ask, is the story – it was a simple cock-up. RBS misread EU regulations about extending credit to
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Are you a “politically exposed person”? This is what RBS wants to know about its prospective clients, this is the question that led me (when posing as a potential client) to be asked if I was a member of a political party. And when a state-controlled bank like RBS asks people if they are “politically
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Some tip-offs are so awful that you almost hope they are untrue. When I was told by Geoff Robbins, a computer consultant, that he had been asked about his political connections before opening an account with the state-controlled Royal Bank of Scotland it sounded fantastical. Having the state owning the UK banking system is bad
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In PMQs today, Gordon Brown described the era of nationalised banks as a “wholly new world”. How right he is. The collision between the worlds of politics and banking has created much potential for mischief and I look at some of it in my political column for tomorrow’s magazine including what for me is the
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Hmmm. So much for manufacturing-based recovery that is supposed to come as a result of the crash of sterling. Manufacturing output was off 2.9% in January, the eleventh consecutive drop. The fact that we’re a lot cheaper to Americans and Europeans doesn’t seem to help much – partly because any sane foreign client will demand
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So what is to become of Patrick Mercer? On the Today programme this morning he was introduced as someone who “has served nine tours in Northern Ireland” – i.e. that rare thing: a politician who knows what he’s talking about. As opposed to Shaun Woodward, whose sole credentials are being a Tory turncoat and being
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Terrorism is a propaganda war where words matter as well as bullets, and those who murdered the British soldiers at Massereene Barracks could not complain at the much of the coverage today. The BBC news, and much of the other news, announced simply that the Real IRA had carried out the attacks. Someone who does
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Why is it Left wing to allow millions to live on benefits, and let children get each other pregnant? Tom Harris asks this question in an excellent article in the Mail on Sunday today. He’s right to get angry about a situation that means one in five UK children are brought up in workless households,
