Fraser Nelson is a Times columnist and a former editor of The Spectator.
Here’s a recap of the gossip around the bars last night.. 1. Early election: Perhaps Brown started this hare running to wrong-foot the Tories, then came to take it seriously himself. Now the hype is so big, that perhaps Brown can’t stop it and will look cowardly if he doesn’t go now. He’s leaning
As I type, a frustrated cleaner has just come in my room in Bournemouth. To my amazement, she’s English. We get talking about Brown’s “British jobs for British workers” mantra, and it dawns on me that she’s a living example of why it won’t work. She says she’s one of only three Brits in the
Was that it? Gordon Brown’s speech was no launch-pad for an election or anything else. It was competent and workmanlike but its shopping list of initiatives recalled his duller budgets. The NHS saved his sight, he says. Maybe so, but biographies of Brown tell how frustrated he was with years of duff advice from the
It will be, for Gordon Brown, a sweet irony. For years he has longed to address Labour conference as its leader. Now, when it is finally his turn, he can no longer do so — at least not in the way that he had foreseen. His mission is to stand at the podium in Bournemouth
It’s Sunday evening, and John Hutton has just come back from one of his regular weekend in Ypres. The Secretary of State for Business and Enterprise is an enthusiastic first world war amateur historian and is currently writing a play based on one of the stories he’s unearthed. It’s about John Elkington, a British colonel
I have just been telephoned by the BBC about my “interview with Margaret Thatcher” where she laid into David Cameron. Em, not quite. It was a comment of hers I reported in my News of the World column in April and repeated on Coffee House yesterday. It was picked up on ConservativeHome and ran in
Where would the Liberal Democrats be without the insinuation that the rich are let off lightly by the tax system? But I would like to let CoffeeHousers in on what seems to be a secret. The richest 10% actually stump up the majority (53%) of tax collected in Britain. And the richest 1% stump up
As David Cameron prepares to speak, I would like to helpfully outline five components behind the mess we see today. 1. Bungling central bankers: As I blogged earlier, the Bank of England refused to support banks with the zero-penalty lending rates offered in every other major world economy. There’s a strong case for such discipline, but
There is just one consolation for Sir Menzies Campbell as he prepares for his second and probably last conference as Liberal Democrat leader: they will not come after him in Brighton. It is too late, now, to knife the leader. Gordon Brown could call an election at any moment, and there is no time for
The Zac-Gummer boomerang, thrown in December 2005, has hit Cameron in the face today. The Quality of Life group policy report is overflowing with guff. Take their headline plan to add VAT on short-haul flights. Has it occurred to either of them that VAT is reclaimed by anyone on business trips, so this would only
William Hague has just given a non-committal response to the “mixed results” of the American troop surge. I’d rather have liked him to say something like this (adapted from the Giuliani article I mentioned earlier) In Vietnam, just as in Iraq today, America fought a war with the wrong strategy for several years. And then,
I have to admit: last week was a bad one to take off. Plenty happened in Britain, which I’m digesting now (what was Mercer playing at?). But for what it’s worth, here are a few observations from my week in New York… 1. Rudy Giuliani’s campaign is more advanced and heavyweight then is appreciated this side
I have a bit of good news for James (and Iain Dale). Zac won’t be listened to. I understand that of the six policy review groups, the favourites of the Cameroon leadership are the social justice and competitiveness report (by IDS and John Redwood respectively). The others are not considered to have much meat in
Greetings from Sweden, where the newspapers today report that huge demand for Chinese has now made it one of the top three languages taught in schools here. Sweden has the voucher system, so the curriculum responds to parental demand rather than ministerial diktat. Imagine that. In Britain, just 4,000 of our 3.3 million state pupils
Brown has handled the crises well, but let’s not forget he is to blame for many of them There has been something almost Biblical about the challenges which Gordon Brown has had to contend with since moving into 10 Downing Street. It started with the curiously unseasonal weather, which plunged London into darkness one July
Sir Tom Cowie is always great value for journalists. When I was a business hack, I would call him up when reporting the annual results of Cowie Plc, the car company he founded (but, by then, had retired from). He would obligingly denounce its management, thus sprucing up my story. “Sir Tom Cowie attacks Cowie
After Quentin Davies defected to Labour, Ed Balls hinted that there would be more to come. Well, one is about to be announced. Are you sitting down? It is none other than David Anstee, 26, former vice chair of the Rhondda Conservative party. Here are the words his new friends have written for him: “Like
Gordon Brown will not holiday abroad this summer. Not for him the allure of a Tuscan palace or the sunbeds of Sharm el-Sheikh. The Prime Minister has instead created perfect happiness inside his home in Fife: a room wired up to the 10 Downing Street computer system where he can monitor the government he now
We have a winner in our competition to say, in a sentence, why a normal voter would wish for a Conservative victory. It shows what a fix Cameron is in that so few Tory-supporting people could come up with a good reason for him to be Prime Minister. There were some hilariously cruel suggestions, but
I was struck by the fact James plucked out of that Newsweek article – that “every second child in London is born to an immigrant mother.” Could it really be true? Silly question –Newsweek is known for its accuracy, and originality. The data is in Table 9.2 of this Office of National Statistics Excel file