Fraser Nelson

Today, on the Andrew Marr show, Ed Miliband repeated his porkie that David Cameron plans to reduce state spending to 1930s levels. When he first made this bizarre and obviously untrue claim, even your baristas here at Coffee House didn’t have 1930s spending data to hand. Now we do, so the extent of his deceit can be laid bare. The above graph (which you can explore by moving your cursor over the lines) shows total UK government spending, adjusted to today’s money. At £720 billion, the level of state spending in 2020 under George Osborne's plans will be almost ten times higher the levels of the 1930s.

A lot of rot is written about what MI5 thinks, because the spooks don’t talk –even to deny wrong stories (like the supposed Remembrance Day Plot to kill the Queen, etc). But now and again, they do speak. Andrew Parker, the agency’s director-general, gave a wide-ranging speech last night which worth reading in full. It makes the front pages today. Here are half a dozen points which jumped out at me: 1. The terror threat is heating up. ‘Terrorist-related arrests are up 35 per cent compared with four years ago. Since 2010, more than 140 individuals have been convicted for terrorist-related offences’. 2. Three Islamist plots have been intercepted ‘in recent months’. Since 7/7, police say the spooks have intercepted a major Islamist plot a year.

Another day, another poster – and this time, it’s Labour stretching the truth. The above is the same trick as George Osborne was playing with the deficit. The reader is invited to believe that the Tories would cut state spending back to 1930s levels 'when there was no NHS' – or much of a welfare state at all, come to think of it. In truth, George Osborne has (unwisely, in my view) pledged to increase NHS spending if re-elected and overall state spending will be at least five times higher than in the 1930s. So how can Labour get away with this - and how did this deception enter the public realm? This ‘1930s’ line was the biggest single vulnerability of George Osborne’s statement last month.

So – how did it go? Yesterday, Tory HQ yesterday issued a poster with the misleading claim that the deficit had been ‘halved’ where in fact the reduction has been closer to a third (see below). In election campaigns, a ‘porkie*’ is introduced in stages. It debuts when dropped into a speech or article. If no one complains, it gets used again with a bit more boldness. And if there’s still no pushback, it’ll be used bigger – say, on a poster. As it was with Labour’s £35bn Tory cuts porkie, so it is with Osborne’s ‘halved the deficit’ porkie. But judging by today’s newspapers, the 'poster' stage of this porkie seems to have gone rather badly. “Fib!

New year, new porkies from Conservative HQ. It has opened 2015 with a poster that involves a deception (above): ‘the defict halved’. It’s a relatively small deception: the deficit has been reduced by a third (see graph below) just as David Cameron was saying only a few weeks ago. But this poster makes a more important, and more depressing point: the Tory leadership is prepared to use dishonesty as a weapon in this election campaign. Here’s how I suspect it all unravelled. George Osborne invented the porkie: that you can say ‘the deficit has been halved’ if, when challenged, you later claim that you’re referring not the deficit, but to a ratio: a deficit/GDP ratio. This is a valid metric, but it’s not "the deficit".

Will Sir John Major be asked to lead Britain’s Europe renegotiations? The Telegraph diary raises this prospect – and it makes sense. As a former PM with clout and credibility he would be well-suited to the job, and has made the case for such an external negotiator in the past. His recent speeches about Britain's relationship with Europe have struck some as an audition for this job. When Sir John was on Andrew Marr’s sofa last month, he was asked about this directly: Major: I think there are some practical things that could be done that don’t infringe the principle but do meet the problem, but I think frankly they’re much more likely to be done if they’re not aired in public but discussed in private.

Can the Tories really be planning to fight the next election lying about the deficit? I ask because in his speech today, David Cameron has just repeated an untrue claim which made its debut in a George Osborne newspaper article a few days ago: that they have 'halved' the deficit*. Here's what the Prime Minister had to say:  'Already we have cut the deficit in half and we have set out clear steps to finish the job by 2018.' If honesty matters at all in politics, neither Cameron or Osborne should get away with this. This is no slip of the tongue - it was in the script. The Tories are testing the water, seeing if the media will kick up. If no fuss is made, then I suspect both will go all the way through to the election falsely claiming to have "halved" the deficit.

Mark Pritchard, MP for the Wrekin in Shropshire, was arrested on Tuesday following an allegation of rape. The Metropolitan Police said in a statement: 'We can confirm that a 48-year-old man voluntarily attended a north London police station on Tuesday, 2 December where he was arrested, following an allegation of rape in central London. He has been bailed to a date in early January 2015 pending further enquiries.' It wrote said the following in a letter sent to the Speaker's Office: 'I write to inform you that on 2nd December 2014, Mark Pritchard MP was arrested at 6.14pm at Holborn Police Station in London by MPS officers. Mr Pritchard was questioned by police and released on bail later the same evening at 10.16pm.

George Osborne had dismal figures today, and still managed to present them as a triumph. He even presented his failure on the deficit (below) as a success, and got away with it because Labour really doesn't have an alternative plan. The Chancellor did have some genuine boasts: the job-creation miracle continues and corporation tax revenue is up in spite of (or, rather, because of) corporation tax cuts. And he has his very own Mansion Tax! So he reduced his political exposure from the left, his main weakness now is on the fiscal right. And who will attack him from the fiscal right? Anyway, that's the politics - the below is the economics. 1. The deficit comes down a tad, but is still way off original plan. And Osborne claims there’ll be surplus in 2018-19. 2.