Fraser Nelson

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 only proposal, hence plans for streaming by ability, reading age etc. While this will soak up today's media attention it will be a small part of the Tory education reform now in prospect. It is hard for Britain to imagine a system where pupils choose schools and not vice versa, which is why Cameron will have problems getting this message across. Even Sweden had no idea how effective the 1993 schools proposal would be.

Much as I applaud the Tory education plan in general, my heart sinks when I see stories such as one on the front of The Observer that Cameron wants all kids to read by the age of six. This strikes me as the contradiction running through Tory policy: to regulate, or liberalise? The plan for pioneer / direct grant / Swedish/ voucher / whateveryouwanttocallthem schools empowers and trusts teachers. Today's initiative seeks to do their job for them. Cameron has no expertise whatsoever in primary education, why should he be prescribing synthetic phonics or anything else to these teachers? I declare an interest in that my mother was until recently a learning support English teacher at a primary school in Gordon Brown's native Kirkcaldy. Phonics has been around since she was a kid.

Brown lost over immigration at PMQs, but wasn't thumped which is a result for him. He is desperate to tease out a Tory split on the EU referendum, and may be making progress. I notice that when Brown embarked on his usual misleading economic boast (incapacity benefit numbers are dropping about as fast as Venice is sinking), he did not claim to have created 2m new jobs. We now know immigration is to thank for most of this. The Tories should explode the rest of his myths, and leave him with no ammo at all. He seemed more assured today, but Cameron played better to the cameras. And that, of course, is what PMQs is all about.

David Miliband was the guest of a press gallery lunch today and the Foreign Secretary had prepared the obligatory joke. Inspired by the decision of his French and German counterparts to record a duet, he would make a record with Lord Malloch-Brown. They agreed an Elton John track, he said. He suggested "sorry is the hardest word", but MMB instead suggested "I'm still standing". They finally agreed on Captain and the Kid. (Or as MMB would say, the Secretary of State and the wise eminence) Asked if he thought MMB would be in his job in a year, Miliband replied "absolutely". So there you have it.

I had always expected a major Brown backer to start selling shares in our PM. But I would never have guessed it would be Sir Ronald Cohen, who is supposed to be the PM’s chief fundraiser. But you’d hardly notice it: “Adviser to Brown praises Cameron” whispers the Guardian on page 10 (and longer interview on p29).  Turns out Cohen is appalled by the bungled Budget and capital gains tax rise. He then tells it like it is:"All of a sudden, what looked like a one-horse race is now a two-horse race….

For all their woolly policies, the LibDem are dirty fighters, as anyone who has seen them campaign will attest. So it was only a matter of time before its leadership election turned vicious. Chris Huhne has dropped off press releases demanding that his rival Nick Clegg seeks corrections from newspapers who have suggested he’s in favour of education vouchers. Clegg repudiated the idea of vouchers, says Huhne, at a hustings meeting last weekend. All this, of course, makes me all the more favourably inclined towards Clegg. There’s nothing illiberal about school vouchers, and the idea chimes squarely with localism and empowering people rather than the state. It’s ideas like this that would get the LibDems back in the game. The Tories should hope Huhne wins.

Walking into the press gallery, I saw something I haven't seen for ages. Labour MPs animated, laughing, roaring, unfrozen. David Cameron was making the light-hearted speech which follows opening of parliament, and making everyone laugh. "We welcome the climate change bill, and when it comes around next year we will welcome it again". Labour MPs were allowing themselves to be entertained; Showing that it can be done. Sadly for them, Gordon Brown can't seem to do it. When we moved to the combat phase, Cameron was on great form speaking with immense confidence. Taking interventions, he was asked about the "black hole" in his plans - Brown's favourite theme. "I was wondering how we would go before the whip's read-out question", he said.

The immigration statistics saga takes another turn today, as the News of the World produces figures showing that immigrants from the 25 EU countries account for just 32% of the total. Ergo, ministers have been able to control immigration all along – and its repeated suggestions to the contrary are untrue.   It fingers Liam Byrne, who attacked Cameron’s proposals last week with a very different statistic. “His small print seems not to touch European Economic Area nationals, overseas students and dependents who made up 80 per cent of British incomers last year," said Byrne.   Now, Byrne is one of the good guys in this government, but his occupational hazard is going out there with data supplied to him by the Home Office.

There is something about impending doom which focuses the mind. That is why the Tory conference in Blackpool was perhaps the most effective brainstorming session in the party’s history — albeit inadvertently. David Cameron arrived facing an election. He left the northern seaside resort having scared Gordon Brown away from going to the polls — and, in the process, launched a policy strategy more radical than he had ever dreamt he would be pursuing. The proposal to raise the inheritance-tax threshold to £1 million grabbed all the headlines and seems to have struck a chord in the Labour marginals that worried the PM very much.