Fraser Nelson is a Times columnist and a former editor of The Spectator.
Second acts in British politics are vanishingly rare these days and Liam Fox, restored to the cabinet by Theresa May, is determined to make the most of his. We meet at his central London flat at half-past four on Sunday afternoon and even then the International Trade Secretary is beavering away: preparing for his meetings
Quite extraordinary scenes here at the Labour Party conference. I’m typing this in the main conference hall and have just watched Mike Katz of the Jewish Labour Movement give a short speech against anti-Semitism. This ought to be utterly uncontroversial, but it has become a wedge issue between the two tribes who now make up
Now that Jeremy Corbyn has won, the fight moves to the jungle of Labour Party rules, regulations and procedures. Whoever controls these controls the party. Last Tuesday, for example, an eight-hour session of the party’s governing National Executive Committee (NEC) concluded that Scotland and Wales should each have their own member on the NEC. This
Tim Shipman’s book about the EU referendum campaign, All Out War, is serialised today in the Sunday Times. The newspaper today leads on the remarkable disclosure that David Cameron blames Theresa May for the paucity of the deal he negotiated in those 30 sleepless hours with Brussels. Here’s the extract:- Before the speech, conscious that
When I wrote my last Daily Telegraph column critical of Btecs, an exam now taken by about a quarter of English university entrants, a friend of mine in the world of university admissions told me to wait for the reaction of Pearson Plc, which owns Btec. While A-levels and GCSEs are rigorously examined and discussed, Pearson get
Throughout the EU referendum campaign, we heard that Brexit would not only sink the UK economy but destroy the Union because Scots were likely to vote Remain. In the event there was a difference at the polls—38 per cent of Scots voted for Brexit, vs 52 per cent in the UK as a whole—but was
Is David Cameron trying to trash his own reputation? First came the worst resignation honours list for decades, which seemed designed to confirm everyone’s worst fears about his chumocracy. And today, he has handed a gift to those who denounced him as a career politician, someone with no sense of public service, whose interest in
When Theresa May appointed three of the most outspoken and free-minded Brexiteers to her Cabinet, her fellow Remainers were delighted. Surely the only question is what they’d do first: implode or disembowel each other? Ever since, the speeches they’ve made have been seen through this narrative. First, David Davis was seen to have gaffed for pointing out
The parliamentary move against democracy is gathering strength. The notion that parliament might vote down the results of the referendum is being backed by some serious, intelligent politicians (and Labour’s Chris Bryant). My old boss Patience Wheatcroft is leading the attempt in the Lords, hoping to stall it until such times as another referendum could
You can’t fool all of the people all of the time, said Abraham Lincoln. Theresa May faces a different question: for how long can you string along an entire electorate? She has been a defender of the pledge to cut net migration below 100,000 – a pledge that was adopted in a different era, before
A subscription to The Spectator buys you more than just full access to the world’s greatest magazine. It also means a ticket to our subscriber-only events and debates, and our next one is in a few weeks: a debate about Clinton vs Trump, moderated by Andrew Neil, on Tuesday 18 October. Conrad Black, formerly publisher
Just before The Spectator went to press yesterday, my colleague Emily Hill pointed out that I’d just taken away the only male name away from the cover: all seven of our coverlines were stories written by women. Did I really want that? I hadn’t thought about it until then, and for a while I did
The biggest puzzle of Theresa May’s premiership so far is why someone who pioneered laws against modern slavery and was so tough on stop-and-search should take such an extreme and heartless position on EU migrants. Her declaration – that she’d use them as bargaining chips in Brexit talks – struck many who would otherwise support
Shortly before the referendum, Charles Moore emailed me with an idea: he’d always thought how worryingly easy it would be for someone like him, registered in two addresses, to vote twice. So he proposed to do so, and then write it up in the magazine – to flag up weaknesses in our system. As he writes
Boris Johnson has spent his adult life being underestimated and sneered at. But today’s attack by Tim Farron, the leader of what remains of the Liberal Democrats, rather takes the biscuit. Today it emerged that, with Theresa May in Switzerland and Philip Hammond out of the country, Boris is running the British government. So Farron pipes up to say:
When Theresa May was gearing up for a summer-long leadership campaign, she identified a worthy target: George Osborne’s addiction to easy money and the whole notion of quantitative easing. Rock-bottom interest rates and QE, she said, boost asset prices – and, in so doing, transfer wealth to the richest. When she became Prime Minister, the
The UK magazine industry publishes its circulation figures today, and there is good news for The Spectator: the highest sales ever in our long and illustrious 188-year history. Our web traffic has hit an all time high: we broke 4m monthly unique users during the referendum campaign, which is quite something for a ‘paywalled’ publication.
During the Brexit debate, there was a wide mainstream consensus that EU nationals living in Britain should not be affected. As even Ukip said, it would be unthinkable that someone here legally could later be declared illegal. Labour, the CBI, SNP, Vote Leave, pretty much everyone ruled out the disgusting idea of repatriating a single
Today the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has launched a campaign telling the world that London is ‘still open for business’. He has announced a Twitter hashtag: #LondonisOpen. It’s an odd campaign, echoing the ‘Britain is open for business’ line that George Osborne was trying to peddle before being sacked. The premise seems to be that the
A few weeks ago, I wrote a Spectator cover story about David Cameron’s purge of the posh. My peg was a new wheeze from the Cameroons whereby prospective employees should be asked not just where they went to university, but about their childhood and parents’ assets etc. The idea was to make sure that too many posh
