Fraser Nelson is a Times columnist and a former editor of The Spectator.
From our UK edition
Every Christmas time, a turkey emerges to be hunted in the festive news vacuum. From Tim Yeo to Charlie Whelan, many have found themselves with the misfortune to have done something wrong when nothing else is happening – so will be pilloried from here to Hogmanay. This season it’s Bob Quick who is being stuffed,
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The ghost of Christmas Future has arrived at Kirkcaldy – and persuaded Gordon Brown not to hold an election next year. So says Ben Brogan, and it rings true. I’ve previously set out the case for a January election, and Trevor Kavanagh that for a February one. But the PM hasn’t taken our advice, and
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Judging the Threadneedle/Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year awards is far from an onerous task. There are two splendid lunches, plenty of wine, first-rate gossip and more than a little argument. The deliberations are secret, but I can perhaps share with you an unexpected debate that took place when we were deciding who to name as
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The Prime Minister’s routine half-truths, exaggerations and Brownies may have bored the British public into submission, but every now and again we get foreign governments or organisations setting him straight. After the Germans (and everyone else – list here) now it’s the turn of Abdalla Salem El-Badri, head of Opec, to gently point out that
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It’s twelve months of Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrat leadership today and he celebrates by giving an interview to The Independent, saying he wants to be taken seriously. “It would help if he didn’t claim to have slept with up to 30 women,” said Nick Ferrari on LBC this morning. Andrew Pierce then came on and
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‘Tis the season for Christmas receptions at Westminster, where the hacks like myself compare notes with people who know a lot more about life than we do. There’s a distinct lack of bubbly this year – funny how ministers take special care over that, while the government overspend is (literally) enough to fill every bath
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David Cameron plans to lead Labour rebels into inserting an amendment into the government’s welfare reform plans, basically removing all threat of sanction from lone mothers of children of pre-school age. This, I think, is the upshot of his press conference today. “The state prodding, pushing, cajoling mothers of children so young is simply wrong,”
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Much as I applaud David Cameron’s warnings about debt, and his bravery for doing so at a time when the borrowed penny hasn’t quite dropped over Westminster, would he actually do anything about it? I asked him at his press conference this morning. My point: that from April 2010 Gordon Brown intends to increase state spending
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Gordon Brown is actually uniting the world, so far as his approach to the downturn is concerned, but not in the way he’d like us to think. From Tokyo to Toronto, finance ministers are saying that countries with a budget problem (like Britain) shouldn’t seek to borrow their way out of this. Slowly, a consensus
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Does Britain need more volunteers? David Blunkett thinks so, and has just told BBC Westminster Hour that a “civil corps” is the answer to deep poverty. Here are his words (transcribed by the indispensable Politics Home). The lower classes, he says, “see volunteering as the preserve of the middle classes. To reach them, you have
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So much for supposed British electoral apathy: the final of the X Factor just attracted 8m votes – that stands pretty good comparison to the last election where Labour received 9.6m votes and the Tories 8.8m (and most under 35s didn’t vote). Moreover most of tonight’s electorate will have paid to vote – and gladly
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When Gordon Brown urges the bank to “pass on” the interest rate cut, why doesn’t he lead by example with his very own state-owned mortgage company, Northern Rock? Because NR is up to no good – and the Financial Services Authority has given us a rare glimpse into exactly what its game is. It released
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How much is Britain’s true national debt? Gordon Brown says 37% of GDP, the ONS says 43% of GDP – but this is just government debt. The reason Britain is in so much trouble is that our corporate and household debts are huge. It is the combination that makes us such a credit liability –
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I’ve just come back from the Policy Exchange party, which had an austerity feel to it: smaller guest list, no bubbly. And David Cameron gave a good, but rather low-key speech where he said he was pleased that his speech at LSE today went past with no tomatoes being thrown. LSE has a left-wing reputation,
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Is Sure Start really the success story that Rachel Sylvester suggests it is? I asked my colleague at the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), Jill Kirby – perhaps the leading expert on family issues – for her take. She reviewed Sure Start in her CPS report Nationalisation of Childhood. That was two years ago, and
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That three-hour debate on Damian Green really was a waste of time. A poll of MPs shows 30 want Michael Martin to go, but how many say that to in the chamber? Nada. We have some honesty from Douglas Carswell and Bob Marshall-Andrews and that’s about it. Some rebellion. All they were left with was
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This year has seen a gruesome series of stories bearing out the Broken Society narrative, starting with teenagers shooting each other and ending with Karen Matthews abducting her own daughter in search of a McCann-style reward. Look at most of these stories, including Baby P, and there is a common theme: they take place in
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When news of the Tory budget cut was broken by Conservative Home it was spun as a prudent cost-cutting. Yet there is (as ever, with CCHQ) plenty of comic chaos behind the scenes. The basic problem was overspending in the boom years. Last year the cash was flowing in from bankers who could easily spare
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Knowledge that a secret exists is half of the secret, and Westminster loves nothing more than guessing what a secret might be. When The Spectator’s website revealed at 6 p.m. last Thursday that a major Conservative story was about to unfold, there was a flurry of frenzied speculation. One Cabinet member even called 10 Downing
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Why won’t the banks pass on the rate cut? Because there isn’t anything to pass on. And for the life of me, I can’t work out why they don’t point this out. The Bank of England base rate simply doesn’t mean the Bank of England is lending to banks at 2 percent. The plumping doesn’t
