Fraser Nelson

If you’re buying a house, or thinking about it, there’s only one fact you need to know about today’s Budget: stamp duty is changing. Gone is the old system of thresholds, and instead it will be a percentage chunk of the value. And no, this ist a disguised tax graph – the Chancellor expects to lose more money out of this reform than any other. So no tax will be paid on the first £125,000 of a property. Then it's 2% on the portion of the value of the flat up to £250,000, then 5% of the portion up to £925,000, 10% for up to £1.5 million and 12 % on everything beyond that. The new regime is above.

I have just been on Adam Boulton's Sky News show, talking about the forthcoming Autumn Statement with Ann Pettifor, a left-wing economist. "I bet you didn't expect me to defend George Osborne," she told me, after our discussion finished. The UK economy is doing well, she argued, because Osborne has been borrowing like a drunken Keynesian (a good thing, in her book). And she does have a point. The left made a great error when they attacked Osborne for cruel, fast, deep cuts - he is shaving just 4pc from total government spending and giving himself eight years to do it. To give himself so much time. has had to borrow shedloads of money. As much as Alistair Darling planned to.

So often, throwaway lines from the Spectator end up splashing national newspapers. This time, the splash has come from Penny Mordaunt, who won the 'Speech of the Year’ gong in the Mastercard/Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year awards on Thursday. Her acceptance speech has ended up splashing the Mail on Sunday. Here's the story:- A female Tory Minister made a spoof Commons speech on animal welfare in order to say an obscene word after a dare at a dinner with Navy officer friends. Communities Minister Penny Mordaunt said ‘c**k’ six times, ‘lay’ or ‘laid’ five times and mentioned the names of at least six officers during a debate on poultry welfare.

Boris Johnson is about the only politician in Britain to stand up for the rich, pointing out that while they may be annoying, they tend to create jobs and prosperity and having plenty of that is no bad thing. The Mayor was interviewed for the latest Freakonomics podcast, boasting that: "London is attracting huge amounts of international investment... London is to billionaires what the jungles of Sumatra are to the orangutan. It is their natural habitat."   Here it is the podcast - Boris is at the start:- "I'm sure you like your poor people too," replied the presenter - which is an odd question. Does welcoming wealth imply being sniffy about the poor?

The Spectator's 27th Parliamentarian of the Year awards, sponsored by Mastercard, took place at the Savoy Hotel this afternoon. Here are the winners - and a few extracts from my speech. The awards were presented by Theresa May, and here was my spiel 1. Backbencher of the Year: Sarah Wollaston  She plotted a career way that redefines what it means to be an MP. She had never attended a political meeting before being selected for her party, in an open primary where any constituent could vote. Her election to the chair of the Health Select Committee this year underlines her status as an MP who is respected by her peers as much as she is cursed by whips and spin doctors.

Theresa May is getting some stick this morning because she has admitted the obvious: that immigration is never going to get below the 'tens of thousands' target that David Cameron stupidly agreed to in opposition. She can only control immigration from outside the EU which she has successfully reduced to its lowest levels for about 15 years. But she has been blown off course by immigration not by the Slavs but Western Europe - Italians, Portuguese, Spanish coming here to flee the sclerosis of their debt-addled high-regulation economies and partake in the job-creation miracle underway in Britain. National Insurance registration data indicates that the number of Polish immigrants plunged, while immigration from the EU-15 soared. (Some examples below).

It’s being reported that Gordon Brown has decided not to fight the next general election. Odd timing, you might think, he's had almost five years to make up his mind - so why bail now, just four months away from the dissolution of parliament? Such a delay puts his successor at a distinct disadvantage, with only a few weeks to become established in the constituency. The Sunday Mirror dutifully reports that a friend of Brown saying he wants to "go out on a high" after saving the union. I'd point to another factor - the extraordinary resurgence of the SNP (described by James Forsyth in this weeks magazine). This means that Brown might actually have a fight on his hands if he were to stay.

Rochester is not a freak. It has given us a glimpse of what bookies now believe to be the lost likely outcome of the next election: that no one wins. I look at this in my Daily Telegraph column today. 'All bets are off,' said Nigel Farage after Mark Reckless prevailed in yesterday’s by-election. But that’s not quite right: bets are being made, and the balance of money points to ‘no overall control’. That is to say: a Prime Minister too unpopular to win a majority, and too toxic to be able to form a coalition.

(Update: you can now watch the documentary online here) Inequality is rising up the political agenda right now, but the debate usually descends into clichés about wealth, bankers and tax. On Monday, I try to look at the subject more broadly in a Dispatches documentary for Channel 4 entitled How the Rich Get Richer (clip above). I write about it in the Sunday Telegraph today. Inequality UK, a documentary presented by Fraser Nelson from Fraser Nelson on Vimeo. First, the problem is not (as Ed Miliband would have you believe) rich people paying zero tax. For the documentary, I submitted a Freedom of Information request asking after the top 0.01 per cent of earners – ie, the top 3,000. They pay 4.2 percent of all income tax, more than the bottom £9 million.

After spending so many years pointing out Gordon Brown’s tricks and deceits, I had hoped for a bit of a retirement when George Osborne took office. No such luck. The Chancellor seems to have learned too much from his old nemesis and seems unable to resist stretching the truth – sometimes until the elastic snaps. So it proved with yesterday’s EU negotiation. The Chancellor is blowing smoke, but it seems that the £1.7 billion bill has been halved automatically by the application of the UK rebate – in the same way that previous adjustments have been halved automatically by the UK rebate. Osborne’s achievement – a smaller, but genuine one – was to delay the payment.

George Osborne will tonight return from Brussels bringing peace with honour. He says he has agreed to hand over just £850 million to the EU, rather than the £1.7 billion it asked for, as a penalty  for having the fastest economic growth in Europe. If true*, how did he wangle it? I have a theory. He could have told the EU that yes, the UK has pretty strong growth – over 3 per cent this year and next. In theory, this leaves the UK better-able to pay bills. But not this time. Quite the reverse: the deficit is actually going up right now – a bit of an embarrassment for a Chancellor who asked to be judged on his performance on tackling it. In fact, Britain now stands as the greatest debt addict in Europe.

A sell-out crowd gathered at this evening’s Spectator event: Boris Johnson in discussion with Andrew Neil about his book on Winston Churchill.

Alistair Darling has told tomorrow’s FT that he won’t be seeking re-election and is off at the 'relatively young' age of 60 to try something new. He backs the also-departing Jim Murphy as leader of Scottish Labour but will do so as a member of the public. Darling’s decision doesn’t surprise me: there were rumours that he was thinking this way ahead of the last election. He is perhaps the only finance minister in Europe serving at the time of the crash to have come out of it with his reputation enhanced (which is why he has other career options to think about). He was a unifying figure, and therefore  Labour's only hope to lead the Better Together campaign.