Fraser Nelson

Niall Ferguson’s belated decision to back Brexit has aroused a lot of mockery today. Unkind souls are presenting him as a historian in a muddle, but for followers of his writing his new pro-Brexit stance really isn’t so surprising. He says that he had been inclined to support David Cameron and George Osborne, his friends. A noble reason. But it led him into making arguments inconsistent with those that he has been making most of his career. “Brexit woke me up, and reminded me that I needed to pay much more attention to what the non-elite majority of voters were feeling. And on the issue of EU performance, I think they were right," he said (see video, above).  In backing Remain, Niall Ferguson was doing a very un-Ferguson thing.

It started with a blog, and it could end up with a new Prime Minister. Beppe Grillo’s 5-Star movement, which wants Italy out of the Euro, has called for an election within a week – to pick up on the momentum which saw Matteo Renzi lose the referendum by a margin of almost 20 points, far bigger than that indicated by the polls. On his blog, he had this to say:- Hooray! Democracy won! The regime's liars and its propaganda are the first losers in this referendum. Times have changed. Sovereignty belongs to the people, now we start to really apply our Constitution. The first winners are the citizens who raised their heads and went to vote en masse - and they didn’t care about the advice of the TV and newspapers.

Even I can’t say I’m upset that Zac Goldsmith has lost his seat. For the last few days, now, my journey into work has been an assault course created by cheery Liberal Democrat activists campaigning in Richmond - they earned their victory. Not once did I see anyone campaigning for Zac Goldsmith. Not that I wanted to see any of them:  this whole by-election was an elaborate hissy fit by Zac. Voters were being used as political props, to add extra theatricality to his flouncing out of the Tory Party. If he wanted to resign the whip to fight Heathrow, he should have done so. But to resign his seat and stand again put everyone to the trouble of having to vote again – it was an act of self-indulgence that was rightly punished by voters.

The news that Theresa May offered to do a deal on expats – only to be rebuffed by Angela Merkel – is unsurprising. The Prime Minister has ended up in a pretty bad, unbecoming position on EU nationals using them as bargaining chips in a way that has appalled her critics (and even some of her supporters). So it’s not surprising that she wanted to get this awful business over with in her recent meeting with Merkel. She suggested: let’s just agree an EU-wide deal whereby everyone’s expats can stay where there are. But, again unsurprisingly, Merkel rebuffed her. Before their meeting, Merkel said publicly that they would not and could not talk about Brexit, due to the strict rule on not negotiating in any way until the invocation of Article 50.

When the pound plunged a few weeks ago, Andrew Marr opened his Sunday show by saying that this might be a good thing because ‘it had been too high for too long’. It was a minority opinion, and one not seen much in the hysterical reporting of the pound’s plunge. At the Spectator’s post-Autumn Statement briefing last week, kindly sponsored by Old Mutual Global Investors, we raised this a bit. The pound’s fall might make overseas holidays more expensive for Britons, but it also makes our goods far cheaper for the rest of the world. We worry about a worst-case WTO scenario of 10 per cent tariff on cars, for example, but a 13 per cent currency plunge rather makes up for that. So was the pound overvalued?

'Theresa May and I have made it clear that we are very committed to returning the public finances to balance,' said Philip Hammond on the Today programme this morning. But his Autumn Statement did the reverse. It abolished the deadline for balancing the books, and talks instead about keeping the overspend to about 2pc of GDP. It’s a significant change, and a move away from austerity. The massive shift in debt, towards 90pc of GDP, is something he is choosing with his £23bn discretionary infrastructure splurge. To govern is to choose and as Nick Robinson rightly said, the Chancellor has chosen infrastructure over extra support for the ‘just about managing’.

Once, journalists trawled the Red Book (ie, the Budget statement) for stories. Now, the Office for Budget Responsibilities does this for us. There will be plenty in it for Brexiteers and Remainers. The former will be delighted that the OBR pretty much trashes the main assumptions made in HM Treasury’s now-notorious dossier on jobs, recession, house prices etc. But then again the OBR estimates a Brexit effect on the deficit: £3bn this year, peaking at £15.4bn in 2018/19. This has delighted Remain campaigners who now, at long last, have ammunition to write about the costs of Brexit - especially if you add the figures together and come up with a £50-odd billion Brexit effect. Expect plenty of this in the papers tomorrow.

Bob Dylan called it pretty much right. When he sang 'your old road is rapidly ageing' he was calling time on an old order that went on to die in 1968. The events of that year ushered in a liberal order, revolutionising social norms, which lasted until Thatcher and Reagan in 1980. The conservative era then returned, sorting out the mess left by the previous era and ending the Cold War: this was the time of battle-hardened leaders, with a battle to fight (and win). Then came the Blair and Bill Clinton era, modified slightly by David Cameron – defined by a ‘third way’ unwillingness to move too far to the left or right. And now, once again, the times they are a-changing.

When I made my Dispatches documentary about generational inequality for Channel 4, I was struck by how many of the established facts in this debate fell apart upon scrutiny. Yes, there are many legitimate grievances – which I covered in the film. But some of the supposed ‘nationwide’ problems are, in fact, no such thing. Take the national rent crisis, which led Ed Miliband to fight an election campaign which pitted the supposedly wicked exploitative landlords against tenants. He lost that election, in part because he had allowed himself to be sucked down rabbit hole of social media – and one of Londoncentricity. There are a great many problems facing people outside of the capital, but soaring rents is not really one of them.

After the Brexit vote, the Financial Times summed up the general mood in the City by running a weekly doomometer, which was expected to chart the impending economic collapse in real time. But after a brief wobble, the economy got back to normal fairly quickly. Soon, the weekly data started to rather contradict the mood of panic – which baffled the various experts, many of whom had by then forecast an immediate recession. Pieces of good economic news were dismissed as deceptive snapshots. And when Q2 GDP came in looking very strong – 0.6 per cent (it was revised up to 0.7 per cent today) – that was dismissed as containing just a few weeks of post-referendum data. The real story, it was said, will come when the Q3 data arrives for July, August and September.

Quite a few MPs are driven by a strange need for validation, but Zac Goldsmith might be the first politician in history to ask his constituents to vote for him three times in two years. Once as Mayor (the less said about that tawdry campaign the better) and, it seems, twice as MP for Richmond Park. He always said he’d resign and trigger a by-election if the Government approved Heathrow, as it did this morning. Originally his threat had force because Richmond was a Tory-Lib Dem marginal and his resignation would mean that the Tories would probably lose a seat. It was Richmond’s way of saying to the Tories: 'Yes, we’ll vote for you – but only if people like Cameron and Theresa May are being honest about their opposition to a third runway.

'Downing Street says the PM is set to rebuff calls for a flexible Brexit, which would allow parts of the UK to have their own arrangement,' said the BBC radio news this morning. Not quite. This notion has been rejected in Europe, where the idea of doing some kind of separate deal with Scotland or any constituent part of the UK was never a deal. The 'options' that the SNP talk about do not exist as far as the EU is concerned: it is a giant bluff. It's far from clear why she is asking Theresa May for something that the EU has already rejected.

As part of its preview of Tim Shipman's keenly-anticipated Brexit book, the Sunday Times today reveals draft article written by Boris Johnson intended to make the case for his voting to stay in the EU. The existence of such an article was known, and a lot of his enemies thought it would expose him as a fraud. In fact, the article (full thing here) reads like an advert for Brexit with a pathetic "but I'm still going to back Cameron" bolted on to the end. It purports to balance both arguments, but weighs in far more favourably for Brexit. It's not the first time he describes the case for remaining (he revealed his agony in the Daily Telegraph on 7 Feb). So what's new?