Fraser Nelson is a Times columnist and a former editor of The Spectator.
From our UK edition
Tony Blair’s coming conversion to the Catholic faith will not be welcomed by all Catholics. There are many in the Vatican, and the Catholic church in this country, who wonder how a politician with his voting record can be admitted to the church. ‘My First Confession’ would be a great title for Tony Blair’s memoirs.
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A big winner of donor-gate is Chris Huhne. He’s been the face of the Lib Dems on this, as Vince Cable continues to hound Northern Rock. The ability to jump on a news issue is a key skill required for a Lib Dem leader, and he’s demonstrating his credentials here. Where on earth is Nick
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Given that the Metropolitan Police are probably more familiar with Labour Party financing than Gordon Brown himself, this shouldn’t be a long investigation. It could be over in as little as there months. The starting point here is the end point which Yates could not get to: that a crime has been committed. All that’s
From our UK edition
Yates of the Yard is back. So runs the delicious rumour now the Old Bill has been dragged into the donations scandal: Yates won’t run the investigation but he has been appointed the overseeing officer. And Yates has a dossier of all the donors ready. He knows this situation backwards. To help his team on
From our UK edition
How well is school literacy doing under Labour? The international PIRLS study shows England has plunged from 3rd to 19th in the league tables between 2001 and 2006 – a staggering dropped exceeded only by Morocco and Romania. This is how well we’re preparing for globalisation. Doubling the education budget has not, after all, worked.
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What does Jon Mendelsohn know? Enough, it seems, to keep his job. There was muffled laughter in the house when Brown said a “former bishop of Oxford” would look into all this. Who else? Graham Norton? Cameron did well venting incredulity that Brown would use the old Blair-style inquiry device to kick this into the
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I wonder whose turn it will be today to ask the planted PMQs question so Brown can apologise to Labour, rather than the Tories, as he did last week over disc-gate. That was Hoon’s brainwave, but any brownie points he earned will have been destroyed by his disastrous Newsnight interview where he exculpated Jon Mendelson,
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Has anyone heard from Jack Dromey? Last time a Labour funding crisis emerged, the party Treasurer was touring TV studios venting pious anger. Now, silence. There are plenty unanswered questions about all this. If Brown and Benn didn’t take this money from Janet Kidd (the secretary in whose name the cash was being donated) then
From our UK edition
When a patient’s heart stops beating, medics have about ten minutes to revive it. So it is with the Labour government. Gordon Brown is running out of time to get his defibrillator working. He failed yesterday, and failed again at his monthly press conference. He looks puzzled, bewildered and out of his depth. He is
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One of the least explored defects of this government is what Rabbi Lionel Blue calls “moral short-sightedness” – the ability to see problems on another continent, but not on one’s own doorstep. I was reminded of this when Brown announced £106 million of our money to open schools in Nigeria. It’s the latest example of
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The government’s response to the Thursday attack by the defence chiefs was to claim that Britain has the second-highest defence spending in the world. It was a new one to me. Does Britain really outspend Russia, with its phenomenal ballistic output? Or China, the communist superpower whose soaring military budget is deeply unnerving the Pentagon?
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Tomorrow’s News of the World has a poll which gives the last rites to Brown’s reputation for economic competence. It is truly devastating on many levels. 1. Two months ago Labour had a 12 point lead over the Tories on managing the economy. At the last election it was 30%. Now it is zero: they
From our UK edition
There is so much faux theatricality in the House of Commons that it is rare to hear a genuine gasp of incredulity of the sort that coursed around the chamber when Alistair Darling laid out the scale of the latest and greatest disaster on Tuesday. The personal details of 25 million people, including the bank
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Alex Salmond is excitedly brandishing his new House of Commons security pass. ‘Look at the expiry date,’ he says. ‘May 2010. That’s the latest date for a general election.’ By then, on his calculations, Scotland will be seven years away from independence. Each MP has to choose a four-digit security code for the card, and
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Amidst this Black Tuesday excitement, we’ve missed the real intellectual headway the Tories are making in education – as Iain Martin says in the Telegraph today. The Gove v Balls debate yesterday was brilliant: in these days of faux theatricality it’s a pleasure to see two guys who genuinely hate each other go at it.
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So where is the “junior official” who sent all the 25m record on two computer discs? What news of the British civil service’s answer to Nick Leeson? Waiting for his Tory knighthood? In the Bahamas, collecting the £100m from the Hugo Drax of identity fraud? Or in a dungeon underneath No10 waiting for personal treatment
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I have seldom seen the chamber so packed. Brown got his apology in early, thanks to a planted Labour question. In the Brown-Cameron clash, Brown scored a good hit, saying Cameron had proposed cuts on HMRC in the Tory 2005 James review – singling out data processing. Labour loved it. Cameron hit back, with today’s
From our UK edition
The most important political story on the internet is nothing written by a journalist, but the reaction being posted to on the lost data catastrophe. From the BBC to our own Coffee House, people are pledging to shut down bank accounts and vote Labour out. They seem utterly unmoved by assurances that all is well,
From our UK edition
There were genuine gasps of amazement in the chamber when Darling unveiled the scale of this disaster. If you have a child, and receive child benefit, your bank details are right now on the loose. Sort code and account number, together with your address and age of your child – details of 25m people in
From our UK edition
Cameron’s proposal for Swedish style school reform may not win him the next election, but if he implements it properly it will win him a second term. His speech today does what I have long hoped for: put a Swedish-style supply side revolution at the heart of Tory policy. The new schools cannot be his