Fraser Nelson

Just back from David Cameron’s press conference. It was a Blair-style “beat the goalie” session, with journalists invited to ask him nasty questions until they were exhausted. And, like Blair, he walked away unscathed. As ever, I have gripes: he’s still using the meaningless phrase “Social Responsibility” to sum up what his Conservatism is about.

Should Scotland have its own Olympic team? Alex Salmond thinks so, and his point is far from trivial. For the SNP, politics is sport carried on by other means. I was working in a bar during the 1992 Olympics in the naval town of Rosyth, and I’ll never forget the celebration there when Linford Christie’s

A sense of stagnation has descended upon the House of Commons. The king is dead, and yet the new king will not be enthroned for weeks. Nothing much can happen in the meantime. After delivering his latest farewell speech, Tony Blair is still making spectral appearances around the country for purposes no one is quite

My political column has only just been published, and already I’m getting stick for being soft on Gordon Brown. Here’s my case: few can deny Brown has great political skills, unrivalled grasp of detail and is a masterful strategist. And he has character traits which may lead him to deliver many things Conservatives would applaud. 

When John Reid was asked if he’d stand for Labour party leader, he would always give the same sort of reply. ‘I have a life outside politics,’ he told me at the last Labour conference. ‘I play the guitar, I play piano. I have a house in France. I could walk away from all this

So what will the new Brown era be like? No more of that nasty spin? Those who attended Anthony Browne’s leaving party on Tuesday evening found out different. As Chief Political Correspondent of The Times, he has been asked to get the Treasury’s response to the newspaper’s extraordinary scoop that Gordon Brown had been warned

Fans of Thatcher’s famous no confidence debate performance shortly before her downfall, will be pleased to note that the same fey eloquence is enlivening Tony Blair’s final few performances. Oliver Letwin’s obscure musings on the way forward for Cameronism were ripe for being lampooned by Blair who was on superb form today; the walls in the

The latest Westminster gossip: he was told by Gordon Brown he wouldn’t be Home Secretary or Foreign Secretary—the only acceptable alternative for him. Perhaps Brown thought his cabinet would be too Scottish, perhaps he wanted to make way for these new young faces and have ”maximum flexibility” (Reid’s words not Brown’s) for his reshuffle. Or

When I was a reporter in the Scottish Parliament seven years ago, I wrote a piece on the life of the poor Hansard reporters up there. The MSPs were not the most educated types and the Official Report staff had to un-garble their words every night. They claimed some was Scots. But one phrase made

Might Labour keep Scotland after all? I’m told Labour HQ in Glasgow is fairly chirpy this evening. The YouGov poll predicting their defeat doesn’t chime with what they’ve picked up from postal voting, nor the gossip from the exit polls. I can well believe this. There is something in the DNA of Scots, which makes