Fraser Nelson

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 £180,000, a new 45% rate, I've said that's going to be difficult to avoid and I think that is just a statement of the truth.” Difficult to avoid if you have no imagination. It’s not a statement of truth, but a depressing snapshot into the Tory thought process. “If we do x, Gordon Brown will say y, so we should do z instead.

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 are far more informative than those in the Commons: the upper chamber has people who are veterans of economic warfare and know the danger of jumping too much the other way. Here are some edited extracts of my interview with Lord Lawson (read the full transcript on the Spectator Inquiry wiki site) who makes the case for a British Glass Steagal Act. Do you think the FSA was structurally unable to see what has happening?

Lord Lawson has answered your questions on the recession – and then some. He warns that David Cameron will "have to do what we did initially, both cut back on spending in particular but also raise taxes". He also explains how his Board of Banking Supervision – which Brown abolished in 1997 – would have done a far better job than the FSA in seeing the crash coming. And proposes that investment banks should be lightly regulated, but that banks should be more heavily regulated. A return, in other words, to the Glass Steagall Act. Head over to The Spectator Inquiry wiki-page to read more.

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 just pass it on to you raw.  The party, Cameron is saying, must reassure the public that they value public services.  Internal polling (which is the basis for the presentation - basically about party aims in 2009) has shown recently that the Tories are still vulnerable to being seen as anti-NHS. So care must be taken to combat this.

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 an exhausted Labour government 2) Tories would give people more power over their lives, and devolve power to people and local authorities 3) Move away from an economy built on debt to one built on saving 4) Mend the broken society, with radical welfare reform 5) Radical school reform, too. My take... 1) Amen: an exhausted and (under Brown) downright dangerous government. 2) Admirable aim, but Cameron needs firmer, harder examples of this (other than school reform).

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 from the baser intentions of Brown, Balls, Cooper etc. He has been busy chasing Shriti Vadera away from his territory - she's prowling the City, claiming to speak with Brown's authority. He is pushing for transparency and honesty in the government, insisting that his Pre-Budget Report went to 2013/14 so he could show how he would get the deficit back to zero (Brown wanted to drop the tax-raising bad years). His Budget, for example, was the first since 1996 not to have some hidden trick.

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 halfway decent life. So it is still a matter of pride that, in Britain, one is never required to discuss one’s political beliefs. Unless, that is, you want to do a certain type of business with the state-controlled Royal Bank of Scotland. Geoff Robbins, a Cheshire-based computer consultant, recently approached RBS to ask for a credit-card processing facility for his business.

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 but should we have said more about banking debt and corporate debt, yes, we should have done.  Actually saying sorry is the easy bit, the difficult bit is for politicians to look back and say right where did I go wrong; it’s that, that needs to take place in order to build this trust with the public so we can get this economy out of recession and into recovery.” So why the mea culpa?

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 single most chilling development since the nationalisations started – but I’ll save that for when the magazine comes out tomorrow. For now, I’d like to share with you another suspicious aspect. For a while in Coffee House we’ve been saying that the markets wouldn’t let Brown borrow more: what if the Arabs and Chinese tire of buying all the debt? This presumed Brown’s hands would be tied by the market.