Fraser Nelson

At 11am today, Radio Four looks at the Tory school reform plan – inspired, apparently, by our recent cover story on Cameron’s schools revolution. I’m on the panel of Talking Politics, Dennis Sewell is hosting and my fellow panellists are Michael White from the Guardian and Anne McElvoy from the Evening Standard. We pre-recorded on

I’m in the Sky News green room, preparing for an 11.30pm paper review. The front pages coming in could be straight from Gordon Brown’s nightmares.  “Consumer crunch” says The Times in huge type: mortgages up £150 a month, holidays up, petrol 107p a litre and bread up 25p in a year. Its the best way

Here is Gordon Brown’s five-step plan to escape blame for the credit crunch. 1) Blame America for the credit crunch, present Britain as the innocent victim of a global storm. 2) With a straight face, claim the economy is well-placed to withstand the crunch, even though the UK household debt/income ratio is the highest in the

Is Gordon Brown on a mission to prove he is out of touch with what’s happening in the economy? First he tells us inflation is at a record low. Today he offers a £1,500 incentive for certain groups of people to enter a shared equity scheme to buy a house. But today the Halifax shows

We hear phrase “market failure” often enough – but (as Michael Prowse once said) government failure is far more common. The most egregious example is education – and David Cameron says in his press conference today with Michael Gove. Here are a few facts they highlight today in their document (read it here): 1) Some

As it’s Friday, here’s some entertainment – the interview Gordon Brown gave to Radio One’s Newsbeat last year (newly added to YouTube). The interviewer, Rajini Vaidyanathan, specialises in leftfield questions and often gets hilarious results. After asking if he was a “grumpy, dour backstabber” (he was prepared for that one) she asked the then Chancellor

The appalling story of how the Tory Party fixes its MEP candidates is told on ConservativeHome. This won’t be picked up on Fleet Street, as MEPs are such a boring business. But it raises serious questions about the Conservatives’ commitment to localism in running the country, if this is how they treat their own party members.

Of all the scary economic forecasts we’ve heard recently, perhaps the most chilling is the idea that we’re nine months behind America on the credit crunch. What would it mean for us? And what political effect might it have? In tomorrow’s magazine, George Bridges, former campaigns director for Cameron, does for us what politicians do

The hallmark of this ridiculous government is the difficulty one always has on 1 April trying to discern which newspaper stories are April Fools. The Guardian tickles our ribs in suggesting that Carla Bruni is being recruited in Brown’s Government Of All the Talents as some kind of fashion tsar. Is that so much more

Was Alan Milburn on to something? When he proposed slashing Whitehall by a quarter in his interview with me for this week’s magazine – on the grounds that you can only take bureaucrats’ power away if you send them away – I imagined he was just stirring things to be mischievous. But now Matthew Taylor,

It’s always a pleasure when a Labour MP – panicked about impending defeat – ruminates about the future for their party strategy. It’s rarer for a minister to do so – which is why Ivan Lewis’s piece in Progress (picked up in today’s News of the World) is worth reading. Here’s my decoder: 1) “We

David Cameron has an interview with tomorrow’s FT where he comes up with lots of reasons why there will be no tax cuts. Here’s the gist. 1. The tax burden is a not a useful yardstick to judge a government by. As he says: “Using the tax burden is never a good idea because you

My, what a lot of Brownies. I can only assume today’s PMQs was one of those weird things, where no two people can agree. Many of my colleagues in the press gallery thought it was dull. I was riveted. Cameron was taking Brown on home turf and having him resort to his litany of fake