Fraser Nelson

Fraser Nelson

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

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

Paper chase

Having trawled the papers for a 7am slot on Sky News, I can perhaps save you some trouble. Buy The Times today: it is simply brilliant. It’s splash tells us that MI5 has confirmed that British businesses are the subject of internet espionage by Chinese state organisations. This is laden with implications, especially in an era when the government is so lax about the information it has on us. Francis Elliot has penned a great summary of donorgate. Then we have one of those brilliant Times graphics which itself tells a story: how badly Brits survive cancer amongst Europeans yet (typically) spend more than anyone (words online, graphic isn’t). But crowning all this is Matthew Parris’s column on donorgate.

Fraser Nelson

Blair may be about to convert, but will that make him a Catholic?

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. At any rate, though the book may be years away, Tony Blair will soon confess his sins to Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, and later (no one is sure, but the Vatican has heard it will be after Christmas) Mr Blair will be received into the Roman Catholic Church. And in true Blair style, his decision to ‘Pope’ is creating a political storm. In the robustly secular world of Westminster, few care what Mr Blair does with his Sundays.

Friday

Fraser Nelson

Huhne turns donor-gate to his advantage

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 Clegg? Where is his campaign? If he's not careful, winning the Spectator/Threadneedle newcomer of the year awards really will be the highlight of his year. Ps This is good news for Cameron. If Clegg pulled his finger out, he could be a very dangerous foe. But this looks like being a very big "if". Huhne far less of a Tory threat. Update: I've just come out of a Radio Scotland phone-in I agreed to do ages ago. It was a good laugh, sparring with taxi drivers and MSPs.

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

This investigation won’t take long

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 missing is the handcuffs (and another couple of villains). Brown will cooperate. He saw what happened when the last regime played silly buggers with the Met. The all important question is how far the police will investigate. Will they just nick Peter Watt, or ask who else used such circuitous donation routes. And does Watt look like the sort of chap who would allow himself to be demonised as the only villain?

Fraser Nelson

Over to the police

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 their way, Coffee House would like to do its duty for Queen and country and report the gossip around Westminster this evening. 1) The theory that Abrahams was not the “real” donor  is popular amongst those who suspect this was Israeli money being funnelled through him by fans of Blair’s position on Iraq (remember, the first donation was four years ago). After all, where would he find £600k from?

Fraser Nelson

So much for education, education, education | 29 November 2007

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.

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson

Another miserable PMQs for Brown

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 long grass. Good to see Brown had Harman beside him. Dumping on her seemed cowardly. Perhaps, he has finally decided that he needs to start standing up for his Cabinet rather than using them as human shields. Cameron was right about 155 days of incompetence and asking if Brown was simply not up for the job (today’s TV soundbite).

Fraser Nelson

What Brown needs to do now

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, whom Brown personally appointed as Labour’s chief general election fundraiser. It is Mendelson who is now at the centre of the storm over his knowledge of these donations. Brown needs to stand up today and announce that Mendelson has gone. But here's what puzzles me. Did he demand absolute candour from Mendelson? As chancellor, Brown kept a distance from fundraising knowing it to be a dirty business.

Tuesday

Fraser Nelson

Where’s Jack?

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 why did Harman take it? What did they know that she didn’t? Isn’t it rather odd that, as Dromey’s wife, Harman was not better informed? One question Brown was not asked in No10: did any of his staff know about this dodgy cash? He has a political unit (someone had to replace poor Ruth Turner) so did any of his people know about this money laundering episode but not tell him?

Fraser Nelson

Brown needs to recover and quick or he is doomed

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 in grave danger of sharing the same verdict history served on the hapless Paul Martin of Canada: an over-promoted finance minister. No one event has done for him. It has been the accumulation of disasters, a long list which pushed him over the mishap/incompetence boundary on Black Tuesday last week.  There are so many its hard to keep track. But here is a little list of Brown disasters in his first few months.

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

Educating Gordon Brown

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 what I’ve described as his neo-colonialism: his desire to rewire Africa along New Labour lines. Yet its not as if it’s “mission accomplished” with English education – some 40,000 kids leave primary school in Britain unable to read or write properly, setting them up for a lifetime of poverty.

Fraser Nelson

Des Browne’s Defence Spending Fiddle

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? How did Des Browne conjure up the figure? My inquiries have established that the MoD has used the old accounting fiddle of using unadjusted (and, therefore, misleading) currency translations. As any fule kno, the only way to do any meaningful international comparisons is to use purchasing power parity (PPP) measures – adjusted for how much arms their money can go.

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

Not good news, Darling

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 are neck and neck. 2. And among the under-25 Labour are a staggering 16 points behind (31% vs 47%). 3. The Tories are winning (or, should I say, Brown is fast losing) the intellectual battle. When asked who has the best policies and ideas', the Tory lead is 10%. Thus the effect of Black Tuesday becomes ever clearer in retrospect.

Fraser Nelson

Brown cares more about faction fights than the betrayal of 25 million citizens

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 account numbers and sort codes for every child benefit recipient, had been put on two computer discs which were sent from HM Revenue & Customs in Newcastle to the National Audit Office in London a month ago, and lost in the post. The personal details of every parent in the land are on the loose. Despite attempts by the Chancellor to blame this on the ‘junior official’ who sent the data or the courier company, systemic problems are quickly becoming clear.

Fraser Nelson

‘The largest thorn in the side of Gordon Brown’

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 I ask if he chose 2017, his new deadline to end the Union. ‘Could be,’ he smiles, as if to hint that his real timetable is even shorter. The First Minister of Scotland is sitting in his old Westminster office, looking very happy to be back.

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

Set the people free

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. What strikes me is how Cameron and Gove are using the language of the left to sell this - in my view, the only way to get this flying. And not just by calling these “co-operative schools”. At the end of Cameron’s video on schools (here on PlayPolitical) he has this to say: “Why should the private sector have all the new schools, all the innovation, the new ideas.

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson

When will the guilty party be revealed to us?

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 from Mr Brown? He's being kept safe from wicked media in a hotel, apparently, hospitality of the Public and Commercial Services trade union (who may, who knows, flog him to the highest bidder this Sunday).   All this arouses suspicion from some quarters here in Westminster. The PCS is a little too active, it is being said - and are probably orchestrating the anonymous comments from people saying they are serving or former HMRC staff.

Fraser Nelson

Playing to a packed house

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 soundbite for tv: "He tries to control everything, but can't run anything". Brown responded by parroting his oft-vented lines about having run the economy—he didn't, he just taxed it—low interest rates, employment etc. His words were drowned out by cheers - but they were Tory cheers. Labour were silent. Both had the sense that this economic jargon is the only song Mr Brown can sing. And it won't get him out of this mess.

Fraser Nelson

Why the government is in so much trouble

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, and no one is really at risk.  En route to PMQs, I bumped into a minister and we got talking about this. "Who on earth are these people?" he asked. The answer: the British public. People who live miles away from the Westminster village, who switch off when politics comes on television, the type who queued outside Northern Rock to withdraw savings because they did not trust a syllable of the reassurances uttered by this government.

Tuesday

Fraser Nelson

The government’s identity crisis

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 7m families: every parent in the land. This data goldmine was downloaded onto two CDs on 18 Oct by a “junior official” (the fact that it’s so easy to do this is, is in itself, an outrage) and sent from HM Revenue Customs & Excise in Newcastle to the National Audit Office in London (who say they never asked for such detail in the first place). The CDs never arrived. And no one has a clue where they are.