Fraser Nelson is a Times columnist and a former editor of The Spectator.
From our UK edition
After Hillary Clinton’s hilarious “mis-speak” – whereby she concocted a story about arriving in Bosnia under sniper fire – the betting markets have moved again towards Barack Obama, who is now the clear favourite to become president (Obama – evens; McCain – 6/4; Clinton – 7/2). No wonder she got on so well with Cherie Blair.
From our UK edition
“£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 in Mark Steyn’s America Alone. As ever, it makes a deadly serious point: very few moderate Muslims are identifiable and this makes it far easier for Bin Laden to convey his key argument: that there is a clash of civilisations, Islam v The Rest.
From our UK edition
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 as the favoured candidate to succeed Tony Blair. This lasted a few weeks: he resigned on election night and has kept an almost suspiciously low profile ever since. ‘I thought the most helpful thing would be for me to keep quiet,’ he says, gazing at Big Ben out of the window of his rooftop office. ‘But now, I feel I’ve earned my passage.
From our UK edition
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 items, like instant coffee and bananas, are lower even in nominal prices. And where was the Labour person making this point? I may be reading too much into this. But with Balls running DCFS it seems Labour's financial force field is down. Time, then, for the Tories to strike.
From our UK edition
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: up 37%. Eggs: up 34%. Bread: up 28%. Milk: up 17%. All since Gordon Brown became Prime Minister. Can we blame Brown for such high inflation? Not really. But this blows a hole in his risible claims to be providing record low inflation. With this research the Tories are brilliantly exploiting Del Brown’s addiction to statistical chicanery. We explain his various inflation tricks in Brownie no1.
From our UK edition
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 newspaper to find a striking splash: two City Academies run by Kunskapsskolan, the Swedish company I interviewed for my cover piece, are coming to my borough. Things move quickly. Just last month Per Ledin, the head of Kunskapsskolan, was in his office asking me: “City Academies? What kind of a beast are those?” Now he’s saying “I’ll take two, please”.
From our UK edition
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 I thought I’d call on the collective wisdom of Coffee Housers. Any answers? PS – Can we be as precise as to say 3pm, the Jewish “ninth hour”? Four years ago, a pair of astronomers claimed to have scientifically verified this.
From our UK edition
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 Blackpool last October. But Cameron was right first time, and his initial bet has paid dividends. Normally, American presidential candidates resist being photographed with Opposition leaders, but I understand McCain is happy to pose with DC. Let's see if footage of them together makes the news tomorrow. UPDATE: McCain arrived a little early (I wonder why…) and I bumped into them both as I came into the Commons.
From our UK edition
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 – ie, not a snowball’s chance of any nation threatening the UK with weapons, ever. Not a hint here of Russia’s new belligerence and massive ballistic spending that may one day be at the disposal of a nationalist psycho in the Kremlin. And defence wise, “we are entering a phase of overall reduced commitments” – huh? This is the same government fighting two wars and considering deploying to Kosovo?
From our UK edition
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 Cameron teased him (he sat underneath us all). And I couldn’t see – but I imagined – Labour MPs squinting as they read out their planted questions, as if wondering at the brazenness of the text. Anyway, from my perch, it seemed a clear win for Cameron. Not because any of his questions were knock-outs.
From our UK edition
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 under a restored caliphate). Perhaps he should pay them to blog instead. Old Alex Hilton needs reinforcements – the left is heavily out numbered by us here on the right, for reasons I’ve never quite understood. The strange thing about the web is that individual people are far more popular and effective than hired hands. Brown may have a huge budget to get the brightest whiz kids. But what he needs most is a left-wing Iain Dale.
From our UK edition
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 system (like Jon Cruddas and the Labour deputy leader system). Now, the Tories are considering something which makes them a little more nervous - the prospect of Boris winning outright and something going wrong between now and 2010. As if. They should have more faith in BoJo.
From our UK edition
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 mid-2005 poulation. So its a little Brown-style fiddle, as the population of neighbourhoods changes all the time - and the population of sink estates usually falls. New welfare rolls as a fraction of old population can be relied upon to produce a false, but higher figure. The News of the World would have been furious with me if I'd used this little scam to get slightly more impressive headlines. The Tories had best be careful here: Brown is a master of such small fiddles.
From our UK edition
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, has been Britain’s principal problem in the war on terror. The identity and profile of the typical British jihadi was a mystery. Many argued he did not exist at all — until the July 2005 London bombings spectacularly proved otherwise. In those days, MI5 was tracking just 400 terror suspects. Now the figure is 2,000, and rising.
From our UK edition
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 proxy” – saying “base rates are falling, so homeowners can rest easy.” But as I have blogged before, the distinguishing feature of this credit crunch is the decoupling of the base rate from de facto mortgage rates, as the graph below from John Charcol shows. We are entering new territory, and the old financial relationships are not a reliable guide to what lies ahead.
From our UK edition
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 from the high ranking of taxes - and the featuring of MPs expenses - these bookies don’t always get it right. So there’s money to be made. Mind you, someone had to put Frank Roy out of business… Ladbrokes odds:- What will be the topic of David Cameron's first question at this week’s PMQs?
From our UK edition
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 its taxpayer with £100,000,000,000 debt, à la Northern Rock. The cost of this has been kept in the banking industry. Britain will have many, many years to rue the fact that its government was incapable of banging heads together as quickly.
From our UK edition
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. For example, we know from local authority data that one in four of people are on benefits in Liverpool. But that’s an amalgam of rich and poor areas. The welfare ghettos – areas where entire streets are on incapacity benefit – have been obscured. Until now.
From our UK edition
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 himself may have moved next door to 10 Downing Street — but the small print of the Budget exposed the extent of the damage wreaked before he left. Not since Lord Howe of Aberavon moved to the Treasury in 1979 has a Chancellor inherited a worse situation. Like most countries, Britain has enjoyed an economic upturn in recent times.
From our UK edition
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 who never listen to the political news if they can help it (ie, most of the public) will listen to this. That's why it's so shrewd of David Cameron to get out reaction quickly, with good quote, thus becoming part of this mammoth story. He told reporters in Gateshead: "So often in these cases, you wait and you wait and then you hear tragic and awful news. All of us were thinking that was maybe what might happen and it is great that she is alive.
