Fraser Nelson

A long, long time ago, when it was still quite unlikely that the Conservatives would form the next government, George Osborne made a promise that, at the time, I thought he’d come to regret. He said a Tory administration would publish online every item of government expenditure over £25,000 – an idea from the Taxpayers’

Today’s Andy Davey cartoon in The Sun (click at the bottom of this link to see it) deserves to go on Darling’s fridge. Because two more pieces of data have just come out which can be confused for good news. One is that personal insolvencies are at a lower level than 2006 and, next, that manufacturing prices

So how significant was Gordon Brown’s claim in PMQs that the world is in a “depression?” Those accustomed to his word-mangling wrote it off as another verbal slip. But as Dizzy points out, the world’s press were less sanguine. As a result No10 has spent much of the day trying to explain that we have

So why was Wen Jiabao, the Chinese Prime Minister, carrying Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments in his bag when he came to see Gordon Brown? My hunch is that his aides found it contained a perfect description of the man he was about to meet. I reprint Smith’s almost Nostradamus-style description here. This is

Oh the weather outside may be frightful, but David Cameron went ahead with his education speech today – a subject on which he doesn’t say enough, in my view, because there is so much to say. The policy he had to launch was a Carol Vorderman-led maths review, but there were plenty of other aspects

The prospect of a “British Jobs for British Workers” controversy will have haunted Gordon Brown long before he came up with the soundbite. He will have known, way before Fleet St did, that immigrants had taken (or created) 81 percent of British jobs. He’ll have known – as he paid for the bills – that

When Reform Scotland was set up, I feared for their prospects. Although Scotland was birthplace of the Enlightenment, its new parliament has failing strikingly to produce any new ideas. It has instead proved a reactionary force, priding itself in banning things before England does and using powers to reject reform introduced by Blair in England. So what chance

So what will the Brown stimulus actually do? Suspiciously, we’ve never been told. In America, Obama has shown the public what they’ll get for their money – how his stimulus would boost employment and the economy. Seeing as no one in Britain has done this exercise, we at The Spectator commissioned Oxford Economics, perhaps the best

“Why did nobody notice it?” asked the Queen a few months ago, at the LSE. The simplest answer is that inflation targeting was a disaster. People wrongly thought that if you controlled the prices, all else would follow. This was wrong, hopelessly wrong, calamitously wrong. Everyone gushed about what a great idea Bank of England

Channel Four has just released a striking exchange between Sir Ian Blair and Boris over the de Menezes case, released from Freedom of Information. Boris had gone on the radio to say that one could argue that the police had been “trigger happy” in Stockwell tube that Saturday morning. Sir Ian wrote to him saying

Harriet Harman, now 3-1 favourite to be the next Labour leader, has a cunning plan to shaft the Tories. For some time now, she has been badgering Brown to outlaw MPs having second jobs. As I disclose in my News of the World column today, the PM is now warming to it because he thinks