Fraser Nelson

Superb poster by the Tories which makes debt into a real, human issue (just as Coffee House urged him to in November) - a picture of a baby with the words "Dad's nose, Mum's eyes, Gordon Brown's debt". It calculates that a baby born today will owe £17,000 - and there is no exaggeration here. Brown repeatedly claims to have reduced debt, such a whopper that he's seldom contradicted by interviewers. The truth: in 1996-97 the UK debt was £347bn. By the end of the boom in 2007-08 it had soared to £527bn and is forecast to  hit £1.02 trillion in 2012-13. And this is using Brown's method: ie, not including the nationalised banks or the debt hidden in PFI contracts.

More defections from Tory HQ: Natalie Kirby, Cameron's assistant head of media, is off to run the press at..... McDonald's UK. Before Coffee Housers snigger, I'd like to point out that McDonald's corporate debt has a lower risk rating than UK government bonds, so the markets are in no doubt about which is the dodgier institution. I’m not joking: McDonald's has a credit default swap rating of about 70 while the UK government’s is about 100. This means that the market genuinely thinks that quarter-pounders are a safer bet than pounds. Cameron will argue that as companies prepare for a change of government, its inevitable that Tory staff will be headhunted. But I can't help noticing that the flow of high calibre staff does seem to be leading out of, not into, its Millbank HQ.

Ed Balls never gets enough credit for the Brownies that he cooks up. One was served today, when he spent an interview with the Beeb denouncing those Tory plans to axe 220,000 apprenticeships. As he put it: "There is a choice for our country - a choice between a Government which says we must act to get through difficult times and the Conservatives, who on Monday announced cuts in public spending which would mean over 200,000 apprenticeships cut. In fact, it would mean almost no apprenticeships for young people at all." Except there are no Tory plans to axe apprenticeships. Not one. It was concocted by Mr Balls, on the grounds that if you lie in politics via figures, you get away with it. What Labour have done is do their own fake Tory budget-tightening exercise.

As Waterford Wedgwood goes bust and its obituaries written, it’s worth noting its contribution to an area for where it gets little credit: outlawing the slave trade. Much rot is spoken about the abolition campaign, mainly due to the vanity of MPs who like to portray it as the result of a parliamentary initiative. Rather, it was a grassroot social movement – in many ways a viral campaign which owes much the marketing genius of Josiah Wedgwood, the company's founder, who joined the anti-slave trade campaigners in 1790. He had a genius for what is today called product placement. He’d find ways of getting his vases into famous paintings, for example, and figured he could deploy the same techniques in a political campaign.

Will anyone take Gordon Brown’s claim to create up to 100,000 jobs seriously? As a statistician will tell you, “up to” includes the number zero. And as any economist will tell you, government can’t create jobs. The best it can do is move jobs, from the private to the public sector via tax – or from the future to the present, via debt. And in this case, I suspect it’s all a hoax anyway. Sure, Brown can hire some builders to renovate schools. But first of all, how many of his 100,000 were going to be hired by the state anyway? And of those who weren’t, can he be so sure they were all otherwise heading for the dole queue?

No.10 has come up with an ingenious solution to what could have been a yearly presentational problem: to have Gordon Brown's New Year's Message as a disembodied voice, with no video at all.  You can listen to it here. And that voice observes that an “old era of unbridled free market dogma was finally ushered out”. Remind us, who was Chancellor during the last ten years? It’s typical of Brown’s pettiness that he also includes in his New Year message a stab at the Tories, saying “The failure of British governments in previous global downturns was to succumb to political expediencsy and cut back investment across the board thereby stunting our ability to grow and strangling hope during the upturn. This will not happen on my watch.

I said that Gordon Brown's VAT cut was too small to notice - yet I have just saved £15 on furniture imports from Bali. Of course, £15 is a serious, noticeable amount of money. Problem is, it only helps people who have £600 to fork out on furniture. And here this is another defect of Brown's useless VAT cut: it helps people like me - who are saving like mad to atone for their borrowing sins - instead of helping the lower-income groups who are most likely to spend extra money. The VAT and duty cuts announced in the last pre-Budget report are, in fact, perfectly regressive - helping the richest the most and the poorest the least. This should not be so - at least not in theory.

It’s not just the Germans. The IMF today has poured scorn on Gordon Brown’s useless VAT cut for reasons that any corner shop owner could have explained to the Prime Minister. Here is what Olivier Blanchard, the IMF chief economist, said today. “Temporarily cutting VAT, a measure that was adopted in Great Britain, does not seem to me to be a good idea - 2 percent less is not perceived by consumers as a real incentive to spend." Blanchard joins a small but growing chorus of international officials criticising Brown. Last week, I gave a list of other countries that are trashing Gordon Brown’s attempt to borrow his way out of debt.