Fraser Nelson is a Times columnist and a former editor of The Spectator.
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“£10 note is at the centre of a crossroads. To the north, there’s Santa Claus. To the west, the Tooth Fairy. To the east, a radical Muslim. To the south, a moderate Muslim. Who reaches the cash first? The radical Muslim, of course – the others don’t exist.” So runs one of the many gags
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On the floor of Alan Milburn’s office is a scroll signed by the Queen offering her ‘well-beloved councillor’ £2,000 to be Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. It is a souvenir of his battles in the Blair–Brown days. He was appointed to this position to co-ordinate the last general election campaign, and was briefly seen
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The Tory inflation report has splashed today’s Mail, got (another) p1 in the Telegraph, p2 lead in The Sun – the list goes on. A direct hit. Proof of Coulson’s nous, but also of Labour’s strikingly ineffective rebuttal mechanism. Most goods on the Tory list are cheaper, in real terms, than ten years ago. Other
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The Conservatives have today published one of the best pieces of research I have seen them do in some time – a “cost of living” report to coincide with David Cameron campaigning in London today. Following on from a spread in The Sun last week, it focuses on what inflationary pressure means to families. Butter:
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The Spectator recently ran a letter from Lord Adonis saying the Swedish schools revolution which I said David Cameron would bring to Britain was in fact being delivered under Labour. Huh, I thought, keep telling yourself that – if it makes this whole Brown thing better for you. But today I picked up my local
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Why is the most solemn day in the Christian calendar called Good Friday? In Sweden and Denmark it’s “long Friday”; in Germany it’s Charfreitag or Sorrowful Friday. That all chimes with what we commemorate at 3pm today – Good Friday does not. I have been unable to find any convincing explanation of this online, so
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John McCain is doing Europe tomorrow: Brown for breakfast, Cameron for afters and Sarkozy in Paris in the afternoon. It’s significant that he’s setting aside as much time for Cameron as Brown. In Bournmouth 06, Cameron hailed McCain as the next president of America – not a claim he (or anyone) would have repeated in
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As Pete said earlier, even by this government’s low standards, the National Security Strategy is a pitifully weak document. It looks like it was ordered up in 24 hours’ notice: the pages have wide margins, large type and pointless platitudes. “Our assessment remains the same as in the 1998 Strategic Defence Review,” it says –
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There are two PMQs: the one seen from galleries in the Commons chamber, and the one on television. The more I go to the former, the more convinced I am the best view is in the latter. Pretty much the whole press gallery jumped to its feet to see what Ed Balls was doing when
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From his deckchair in Vietnam, Guido blogs on the latest openings for the revamped (and, perhaps, jinxed) Team Brown – two web experts. He certainly needs them – Labour’s internet operation is indeed dire, and the No10 website is little better (save for the wonderful glimpse it offers of what UK government may look like
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A week ago, most people I spoke to in Tory HQ had the happy expectation that Boris Johnson was heading for a glorious defeat. i.e. – that he’d win on the first vote and lose the second. So Boris could be seen as a moral victor but robbed of his true throne by a voting
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I thought p8 of the Daily Mail looked familiar. It’s that table of benefits which we ran on Coffee House on Sunday (expanded from my News of the World column). But what’s this? “Tory research” it’s called. On closer inspection, the Tories have used recent welfare figures, and expressed them as a percentage of the
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As Brown unveils his National Security Strategy, Fraser Nelson talks to those in the front line against Islamic extremism. MI5 has expanded successfully, but faces in al-Qa’eda an enemy that is organic, elusive and constantly mutating: gangs built on deadly bravado To defeat an enemy, one must first understand him — and this, for years,
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Now the Fed has cut US rates by another quarter, what’s next? The City expects UK rates to fall to 4.75% by year-end. Now and again, Gordon Brown likes to boast that he is able to reduce interest rates – unlike the Tories in early 1990s. One of Magician Brown’s favourite tricks is the “false
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This is asking for trouble. Ladbrokes has opened a book on the first question David Cameron will ask in PMQs. There will be at least a dozen Tories who will know the answer to this on Wednesday morning, and be sorely tempted to ask their cousin to place a large bet. As you can see
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In today’s FT, Alan Greenspan describes the current financial mess as the “most wrenching since the end of the Second World War” (his hindsight being rather better than his foresight). Dismayed though Americans may be, they can console themselves with this fact. The Federal government did not end up having to nationalise Bear Stearns thus lumbering
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Rabbi Lionel Blue talks about a “moral long-sightedness” of politics – the ability to see problems thousands of miles away (in Africa) or a century away (climate change) but not the poverty in one’s own doorstep, right now. And little wonder: England is very poor at measuring just how bad things are for its poorest.
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It says much about Alistair Darling’s predicament that he used his first Budget to win back a title once used to insult him — being the most boring man in British politics. His office had promised there would be no false scents, no attempts to deceive, no ‘rabbits pulled out of the hat’. The magician
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I passed two Evening Standard vendors shouting out the news that Shannon Mathews has been found alive – even though it’s not in the newspaper. One was listening on his radio. I saw the other stop passers-by to tell them. This story probably eclipses all the politcial news of the last year put together. People
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Aside from the Chinese Red Army and Indian Post Office, the NHS is the world’s largest employer with 1.3m staff. Government attempts to trim this unwieldy, inefficient behemoth are pathetic. We today learn that the NHS total staff fell by under one percent over the last year. The Tories are up in arms. “The Government