Fraser Nelson

Fraser Nelson

Fraser Nelson is a Times columnist and a former editor of The Spectator.

Friday

Fraser Nelson

The new capitalism

Most paradigm shifts in politics are recognisable only in retrospect, but it’s fairly clear we’re living through one now. When you have the US seeking to nationalise $700bn of dodgy assets and the average British household now liable for £3,020 of Northern Rock debt something has changed. But what? I’ve been struggling to find a proper analysis of this, so it was great to read Irwin Stelzer’s meaty lecture to the Centre for Policy Studies where he says that, though free marketeers may hate it, a New Capitalism is now upon us. Here’s his take:-  “You know that a revolution has succeeded when the opponents of change capitulate.

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

Brown has a cunning plan…

Gordon Brown’s Baldrick-style Cunning Plan for global finance involves using the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as an “early-warning system”. Great idea.  When I was a business journalist, I remember the IMF early warnings – about how Brown’s switch to debt-fuelled profligacy post-2000 would end in tears. The key misjudgement made by both Brown and Greenspan was to try and get around the 2001 slowdown (which would have flushed out bad businesses and dodgy loans) by pumping the economy full of cheap debt. Pain delayed today means disaster tomorrow in financial markets. The IMF said in September 2001 that Brown’s spending spree was “regrettably pro-cyclical”. And since then?

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson

Brown isn’t paid to lie to us

A new Brownie was born today at 7am. Gordon Brown came on to BBC Breakfast this morning to tell presenter Sian Williams about how, as a family man himself, he sympathises with Ruth Kelly wanting to devote more time to her children. He didn’t expect to be grilled on his untrue claim that he has lowered the national debt. He repeated his Sky/Marr line: that debt had gone down from 44% to 37% of GDP. Williams told him this was untrue, and that the Office for National Statistics said so last week. She told him, rightly, that he arrived at his figure by subtracting Northern Rock - which he can’t wish away because he’s already sunk billions into it on the taxpayers’ behalf. Brown suggested it was daft to count in Northern Rock “No country does that,” he said.

Fraser Nelson

Ruth Kelly abandons ship

So Ruth Kelly’s last act as Transport Secretary was to deny Gordon Brown the privilege of sacking her. Word of the reshuffle leaked last night – Geoff Hoon out and to succeed Mandy as European Commissioner (not a straight switch, Mandy’s there till Jun09). Des Browne to stay in Defence but (finally) cede Scotland to Paul Murphy who combines it with Northern Ireland and Wales. Liam Byrne to the Cabinet. Unusually, some of the above had confirmation of these moves, so doubtless word reached Kelly that she’s offski. So when journalists started making inquiries, rather than saying “I serve at the pleasure” she said she was offski.

Fraser Nelson

Welcome to the new austerity era, Mr Cameron

Fraser Nelson says that the Tory leader must not be tempted by a ‘safety first’ strategy at his conference in Birmingham. The global financial crisis has transformed the political context and left an opening for the Conservatives to promise true radicalism and to be proudly bold The Labour party conference already had an apocalyptic aura without the preachers from the Plymouth Brethren gathering in Manchester to rub it in. But as they stood at the security entrance, quoting blood-curdling passages from Ezekiel at passing Cabinet members, the text certainly took on a new resonance. The Labour membership knows that the end is nigh, and is just about ready to pass into the afterlife of opposition. And what better leaving present to the Conservatives than a financial armageddon?

Fraser Nelson

This charming man: an audience with the Gover

There are two reliable tricks which can fill the room at any Tory speaking event: offer free beer, or put Michael Gove on the panel. His fusion of almost comic politeness and intellectual ruthlessness have given him quite a following, whether he’s defending neoconservatism or David Cameron. In three short years he has been propelled to the Tory front bench, tasked with devising a supply-side revolution in education which would be the flagship reform for the next Tory government. When we meet he is full of tales about Sweden, where he had just been to visit schools that use the system he hopes to bring to England. His spectacles, which have grown progressively more fashionable as he edged from journalism to public life, have now vanished altogether.

Tuesday

Fraser Nelson

Quote, misquote

Bless. Dennis MacShane says Brown could not possibly be have used a false quote in his leadership speech. In his write-up of Brown’s speech for Comment Is Free, the ex-Europe minister has this to say: Brown sought to take the battle to the Conservatives. Did George Osborne really say that in the midst of a financial crisis "it's a function of financial markets that people make loads of money out of the misery of others"? Brown quoted the shadow chancellor, and a prime minister has to be hyper-accurate in what he says, so this extraordinary quote from Osborne should be more widely known. Hyper-accuarte? MacShane should come by CoffeeHouse more often. For the record, Osborne’s real words were not only “widely known” but said on Newsnight last week.

Fraser Nelson

Brown’s success

Brown’s hour-long speech may have been saved by his six-second “no time for a novice” line. He managed to smile as he said it, with a glint of menace that the cameras picked up quite well. And as for the rest of the speech - I’ve spoken to a few Labour delegates and have to report that Brown went down well. It was a wavelength thing: his claims about his triumphs and Tory failing struck us CoffeeHousers as absurd. But they strike chords with the faith-based community in the hall who actually believe this stuff. So when he promises to legislate to end child poverty – as if that will achieve a single thing – a good chunk of the Labour Party audience will think it’s an inspired idea. He had some new attack lines on Cameron, which went down well.

Monday

Fraser Nelson

Brown’s Enron for Africa

In David Miliband’s “leaving do” speech for Gordon Brown, one line jumped out at me – when he said Gordon Brown has “transformed the debate about international development in Britain”. He has certainly transformed the accounting, by pioneering dodgy off-balance sheet financing of overseas aid. It’s worth revisiting, in the light of his new pious anger about banks who use off-balance sheet financing. His so-called International Finance Facility is a classic Brownite vehicle: it exploits a Eurostat loophole so if three or more EU countries share a pool of debt, it doesn’t show up on any of their books and they can fool their taxpayers into thinking they owe less than they do.

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

The Brownies just keep on coming

On the basis that a Prime Minister should not be able to mislead his country every time he opens his mouth, here is a list of the Brownies to which we were treated on the Andrew Marr Show this morning. The sheer volume of them is overwhelming: this is carefully woven-together matrix of exaggeration, misrepresentation and outright porkies in order to create a fake picture of prosperity. Here is the by-no-means-exhaustive list, all in the space of less then half an hour. INTEREST RATES: "Well interest rates in the last world downturn were 15%. I think everybody remembers that terrible time. Interest rates at the moment, the base is 5%." You’ll remember this Brownie – we first met it during its debut with Sky News on Friday. Two Brownies at work here.

Fraser Nelson

How John Prescott got the better of me

I’ve had the pleasure of doing a column for the News of the World for a couple of years now, but this is the first time I’ve had the newspaper’s title on my conference pass. I wish I’d done it earlier. It seems to drive Labour people quite mad. The ushers here recoil when they check my pass, some tut, others hiss. “Is that newspaper still going?” one of them asked me on the way in. Um yes, it’s the largest selling newspaper in the English-speaking world and its readers are the type who tend to decide British elections. The sort of people whom Labour seems to have given up on, as it indulges itself in the kind of pre-Kinnock policies which proved rather less than popular in the 1980s. Tax the rich, spend spend spend, etc.

Fraser Nelson

Brown is in danger of turning into a figure of fun

Today Brown claimed that every two-year-old will have a free nursery place – by 2018. Coming from a guy who’ll be lucky to be in power by December 18, it’s just a joke. I wonder if John Major is thinking: ‘that’s what I should have done, announced wonderful things to happen by 2007’. It would cost £1 billion and he doesn’t have £1 billion. He doesn’t have the money he’s spending right now. In my News of the World column today (now online) I explain how the danger facing Brown is that he’ll exit not a hated figure but one derided by anyone. Already Alan Johnson has started talking about him as Les Dawson did his mother-in-law.

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

The Labour form book: Jack Straw

Coffee House is running a series of posts on the contenders to succeed Gordon Brown as Labour party leader.  The latest is below.  Click here for our profile of David Miliband, here for Jon Cruddas, and here for Alan Johnson. Jack Straw, 62, Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice Pros Experience: This is a man who has been an MP since 1979, and who - in his near thirty year career - has filled positions including Foreign Secretary and Home Secretary. On paper, at least, it's not a bad record, perhaps the best among any of the potential leadership candidates. Straw's got experience by the bucketful. And that's a useful commodity as the economic storm clouds darken.

Fraser Nelson

The PM serves up Brownies for Sky

Interviewing Gordon Brown is a horrible job. He normally regards interviews as speeches with occasional interruptions, and typically he reverts to his lines while his PR man calls up after to say ‘what Gordon meant to say was…’.  Yet Sky News team squeezed a fairly decent amount out of Brown in their inteview broadcast at 8pm last night. Plus a new crop of Brownies. Some were slips ('Fannie Mac' etc) but the below were, we should believe, deliberate - and should not pass without comment: 1) “In 1997 we came in and… the debt of the United Kingdom was 44% 45% of national income, we cut that and it is now about, I think the figure yesterday was 37% so that is a major cut in debt.” This is – how you say? – untrue.

Fraser Nelson

Politics | 20 September 2008

When Number 10 said that Gordon Brown’s leadership had not been discussed in the Cabinet on Tuesday morning, it sounded a bit odd. After all, every other gathering of Labour MPs in the land has been talking of little else: how much more humiliation lies ahead, and when the end might come. So it came as no surprise to learn that the spin doctors’ claim was untrue. In fact, the issue did come up in Cabinet, raised by none other than the Prime Minister himself — and in the most extraordinary terms. After Mr Brown had gone through the motions of discussing government business (not something anyone is much focused on these days), the PM declared that people should indeed have their say on his leadership.

Friday

Fraser Nelson

Reasons for Brown to be cheerful

The Brown demise is on a downward rollercoaster trajectory: it stabilises before it plunges again. I suspect that a period of stabilisation, and maybe even an upswing, is now on the cards. Yesterday went very well for him, and from the quotes I have seen he managed to get through even Jeff Randall on the Sky interview to be broadcast at 8pm tonight. Also, he may soon have another merger deal to point to.  EDF, which walked away from British Energy in July, will meet during the Labour Party conference to discuss a higher offer. Creating an entente nuclear is one of Brown's main ambitions - something which justifies his tough talk about "long-term decisions", and which, best of all, is a wedge issue with the Tories.

Fraser Nelson

China steps in

This is the moment I’ve been waiting for – China moving in to the chaos and snapping up the giants of Western capitalism. Bloomberg reports that China Investment Corp. may be buying half of Morgan Stanley. The Gulf States got burned by using their sovereign wealth funds to take a chunk of Citibank when the bear market still had plenty to go. I suspected China would wait until the market bottomed, then move with a vengeance. America is particularly allergic to Chinese deals – remember that kerfuffle over New York’s ports coming under Arab control a couple of years back? But things were liquid then. If it’s a Chinese takeover or a Lehmans-style collapse, what would America do?

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

Brown’s charade is working

At 8pm on Friday, Sky will broadcast an interview with Gordon Brown which seals off what will be his best day for months. The risible idea that he somehow played matchmaker between HBOS and Lloyds TSB proved irresistible to news editors last night. It fuses together the political crisis with the financial one and has been written into the script. Him bumping into the part-time chairman of board of Lloyds (not Eric Daniels, who actually runs the company) has been puffed up into the moment when (as one newspaper put it) Brown ordered banks to merge. It’s the perfect myth, which allows him to say “I’m your man for the economic meltdown.” That’s not to say there were not plenty of political sweeteners in this deal, as James blogged earlier.

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson

HBOS-Lloyds, as arranged by Gordon Brown?

Is Gordon Brown trying to take credit for the HBOS-Lloyds merger? Sounds implausible, but the blog of Robert Peston, Brown’s biographer, has this snippet: “I am hearing that this deal has been negotiated at a very high pay grade level, with the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, talking to Sir Victor Blank, chairman of Lloyds TSB, about how helpful it would be if Sir Victor could bring himself to end the uncertainty hanging over HBOS by buying it.” If this is true, I’m amazed the takeover went ahead, given that Brown tends to be 180 degrees wrong about any financial deal – whether it be selling gold at the bottom of the market or selling British Energy shares before they skyrocketed.