Fraser Nelson is a Times columnist and a former editor of The Spectator.
Tony Blair, at least, knows how to keep his silence. When asked about David Miliband’s leadership prospects at his press conference on Tuesday, he repeatedly dodged all questions — knowing that so much as a supportive grunt from him would damage the Environment Secretary’s chances. But as he probably already knew, the issue had been
A fortnight ago, I was invited along to a dinner with John Reid in the private room of a London hotel. It sounded wonderfully conspiratorial, arranged at just a few hours’ notice at a time when speculation about the Labour party leadership was rife. I bounded in to find about a dozen other journalists and
The slide towards extinction in Scotland has persuaded the Tories to draw up a blueprint for separation, says Fraser Nelson. The Scottish Tories would split off — and Cameron’s Conservatives would become the English party For the son of an Aberdonian stockbroker, David Cameron has had an uneasy relationship with Scotland. It is a land
A silencer may have been fitted on the starting gun, but no one in Westminster can doubt that the Gordon Brown leadership campaign is now fully up and running. Ministers are being telephoned and asked when their names can be released as supporters of the Chancellor. Geoff Hoon, still smarting from his demotion to Europe
Even when she slips into a room half an hour late, The Lady can still inspire a standing ovation. ‘Can I welcome Baroness Thatcher who has just joined us,’ said Lord Lamont halfway through the Keith Joseph memorial lecture last Tuesday. He had just started explaining that Sir Keith would have accepted today’s Conservative slogan
David Cameron has never quite understood why so many of his Conservative colleagues are so keen on America. In the build-up to the Iraq war, he was bemused to watch close political friends applauding the Prime Minister’s alliance with the White House and, with it, the Iraq war. He still refers to them as ‘you
Anthony Giddens tells Fraser Nelson that the Labour project has to ‘restart’ and that Gordon Brown can no longer afford to be a ‘closeted Machiavellian figure’ Professor Anthony Giddens, author of The Third Way and intellectual godfather of New Labour, is a hard man to pin down. After days of radio silence an email arrives
The Shatt al-Arab hotel in Basra offers arguably the most wretched four-star accommodation in the Arab world. It has flushing toilets, but that is where the luxury ends. Its swimming pool is now a rubbish tip, and water has not passed through its taps for months. It has long been unclear to its only guests,
Frank Field has been up to mischief. Since leaving government in 1998, he has not been a fan of Gordon Brown, but last week he declared all-out political war against the Chancellor. In an article for the Guardian he outlined exactly why Mr Brown should not become party leader, arguing that he is too associated
The 2018 World Cup is, by every measure, a long way off. Fifa intends to take three years to decide on which continent the tournament should be hosted, and only then start thinking about a specific country. Even the Football Association (which would submit a bid for England) has not yet come to a decision.
It is a strange form of bombardment. Days, sometimes weeks, can pass without any movement from the Metropolitan Police and it seems as if the all-clear is about to be sounded above the Downing Street bunker. Then, from nowhere, comes another arrest, a fresh revelation, and the turmoil starts again. Even the sadist in Gordon
If nothing else, Lord Levy has at least learnt the etiquette of being investigated by police. When he was first detained last July, he contemptuously accused officers of using ‘totally unnecessary’ tactics. On Tuesday, he emerged from the police station without a word — and said, through friends, that he was feeling ‘on very good
Let us take the man at his word. ‘We should start saying what we do mean,’ Tony Blair told his party in 1994. New Labour should promise only what it was sure it could deliver. And at the heart of those promises was education, education, education. ‘I would like,’ he said six months before his
Just after the 2001 election, the triumphant Tony Blair had a plan: he would split the Home Office in two. The PM had been appalled by its performance in New Labour’s first term and had already decided to move Jack Straw to the Foreign Office. But the problem, he feared, could only be solved by
It is 7.30 a.m. and I am the first to arrive at Harris City Technology College in south London, where Andrew Adonis, the schools minister, wants to meet for breakfast. The building is shut, the weather is freezing and a kindly cleaner asks me inside to wait. ‘Are you here for an interview?’ she asks.
How much does a hamburger really cost? Within this question, as one of David Cameron’s senior advisers explained to me, lies the Conservatives’ new driving philosophy. A Big Mac costs £1.99. But if children guzzle too many they become obese and inflict a burden on the National Health Service. The taxpayer funds this treatment —
Fraser Nelson meets Sir Nicholas Stern, author of the government’s report on climate change, and is struck by how much more equivocal he is than his political masters In a lecture a year ago, Sir Nicholas Stern confessed that until recently he ‘had an idea of what the greenhouse effect was, but wasn’t really sure’.
The Byron Consort Choir of Harrow School is exacting in its choice of audience. It has sung for popes and for royalty — and the setting for its performance at Blenheim Palace one night last month was grand enough for either. Trumpeters manned the gates and candles led the way to the Long Library where
It is hard to describe the Slave Trade Abolition Bill 1807 as a Labour victory, given that it predates the party by a century. Still, this does not deter Tony Blair or Gordon Brown from staking their claim to it. ‘The reactionaries told us that to abolish slavery was an impossible cause,’ the Chancellor recently
Iain Duncan Smith must have dreamed about the moment he would stun the Blair government into silence. Derision was the government’s main response to his interventions when he was Conservative leader and, even a year after his ‘quiet man’ conference speech, Labour MPs still amused themselves by saying ‘sshh’ when he rose to speak in