Fraser Nelson

I can confirm that Liam Fox was offered Minister of State at the Foreign Office with responsibility for India, China and Latin America. He politely declined the Prime Minister's idea, even when it was later sweetened with the offer of a place in the National Security Council. Fox, a former party chairman and defence secretary, had been tipped for a comeback and foreign policy is one his great loves (he recently wrote a book, Rising Tides, about the various risks the world faces). So why turn it down? My guess is that he saw Cameron's offer as a means of plonking him on a slow boat to China in the last 12 months before an election. Fox has plenty to say - on the need for a more ambitious economic policy, the Russian threat and the need for European reform.

A few weeks ago, I was reading the newly-published Modernisers’ Manifesto (pdf) published by Bright Blue and a fact jumped out: ‘London is a tearaway success, responsible for 79 per cent of all private sector jobs growth since 2010’. Startling fact, I though – I’d missed that. But about ten minutes of Googling showed that it wasn’t quite true. The fact was from a report by an IPPR offshoot, the Centre for Cities. It used survey data that went up to 2012, before the jobs boom started. You can find the real figures on the ONS website, and here’s what they show. [datawrapper chart="http://static.spectator.co.uk/oRem6/index.html"] But here’s the thing.

In our latest View from 22 video, James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman discuss the two top stories from this weekend — the allegations about a paedophile ring in Westminster and Ed Miliband's localist agenda — and how they will play out over the coming week. We're still playing with the format of this: two-subject discussions, or one? 5 mins, 10 mins or longer? Any thoughts welcome.

Last night's summer party was only the warm-up. Today, we invited some of our subscribers over for a cup of tea in the garden here at 22 Old Queen St. It's a chance for us to meet the people we work for - the best-read, best-humoured cohort of people in Britain (and beyond). Andrew Neil, Taki, Jeremy Clarke, Hugo Rifkind, 'Dear' Mary Killen, Peter 'Ancient & Modern' Jones and Rory 'Wiki Man' Sutherland were all there - with about 120 of our closest (yet un-met) friends. Spectator subscribers aren't buyers of a product, they're members of a club. To join them (and us) for just £1 a week, click here. Anyway, the pictures (all by Lara Prendergast):- The Savoy Hotel kindly brought the tea and nibbles.

In our latest View from 22 video, James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman discuss the two top stories from this weekend — the ascension of Jean-Claude Juncker and Jon Cruddas's intervention on Labour's 'dead' hand — and how they will play out over the week.

I’ve always admired Jon Cruddas, and worried a little at his being placed at the centre of Ed Miliband’s policy unit. What happens if he talks sense? Well, my fears were well-founded: a good dollop of common sense has emerged from Cruddas, through the medium of today’s Sunday Times splash. On 21 June, we learn, Cruddas was speaking to Compass, a left-wing policy group, and was kind (too kind) about the IPPR’s ‘Condition of Britain’ report – which I’d recommend to conservatives with a taste for schadenfreude as it’s almost comically vacuous and exposes a Labour movement entirely bereft of new ideas. Cruddas was speaking about the report, saying that it took the IPPR nearly two years to come up with it.

‘No cuts!’ said banners held at the march on Whitehall today. Well, the Treasury is listening. It has pushed state spending to £732 billion this year, up from £673 billion under the last year of the Labour government. So why the fuss? My guess: lefties like to march and call for the downfall of governments. It's their way of enjoying the weather. It’s a nice day today, some of us have been out celebrating midsummer and those of an angry, leftie disposition have been doing some placard waving. Each to his own. But as the below graph shows, it’s rather hard to accuse this government of savage cuts:- [datawrapper chart="http://static.spectator.co.uk/8k37c/index.

Danny Alexander doesn’t suntan well, but he looks more freckly than normal when we meet in HM Treasury.  He’s just back from the seaside town of Nairn in the Highlands, where, as the most senior Scot in the Cabinet, he’s been sent to fight in the front line of the Battle for Britain. People were queuing to sign up to the Better Together campaign, he says, and he has high hopes of defeating Alex Salmond on 18 September. It all added up to something rather rare for a Liberal Democrat: the feeling of being on the winning side in an election. As Chief Secretary to the Treasury, he has been trusted with making various economic arguments for the union.

If conservatives had an answer to Woodstock, it would resemble the Margaret Thatcher Conference on Liberty held today by the Centre for Policy Studies. The lineup is stellar, and I’ve been here all day. General David Petraeus is one of the many guests and was asked what he’d do about the rise of ISIS. Here’s what he said, 3:30 into the below clip: ‘If there is to be support for Iraq, it has to be support for a government of Iraq. That is; a government of all the people; and that is representative of and responsive to all elements of Iraq. President Obama has been quite clear on this: This cannot be the United States being the air force for Shia militias or a Shia on Sunni Arab fight. It has to be a fight of all of Iraq against extremists.

No one quite expected it, and even now ministers struggle to explain it. But the British jobs miracle has become the single biggest fact of economic life – proving that sometimes, things go badly right as well as badly wrong. Cameron has now overseen more job creation than his last six predecessors did at this stage (above). The excellent Michael Saunders from CitiGroup has produced an excellent report about it (pdf) and some of his charts are below. 1Jobs growth is beating every single forecast (see chart of total jobs, above), even the optimistic forecasts that George Osborne was publishing when he was talking about abolishing the deficit in five years. He has since given himself ten years, but look at these jobs.

David Cameron visits Sweden today to discuss the future of the EU with the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt and the Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte. The Prime Minister is attempting to block former Luxembourg prime minister Jean-Claude Juncker from securing the top job in Brussels. Earlier this year, Fraser Nelson explained how Cameron's 'Northern Alliance' may reshape Europe. If David Cameron were to divide Europe up, he’d make some crude distinctions. There would be the basket cases, like Italy, Spain, Greece, France — examples, by and large, of how countries should not be run.

Tristram Hunt hasn’t lost much time using the Birmingham Islamist schools scandal to call for an end to the autonomy of free schools and Academies. It’s a bizarre non-sequitur. The ‘Trojan Horse’ scandal happened in schools run by the appalling Birmingham City Council (whose defects I’ve already written about). Yet Labour is using this scandal as its own Trojan horse – to take power out of the hands of parents, and give it back to the local bureaucrats whom the party (sadly) now represents: 'Cameron's schools policy has delivered a vacuum in the local oversight of our schools, leaving children exposed to falling standards and vulnerable to risks posed by extremists….

The Bible may be creeping its way back into England’s classrooms if advice from University of Exeter study is taken But it misses a trick by suggesting that kids are asked. to re-tell Bible stories - rather than study its best passages as examples of word craftsmanship. When the folk singer Pete Seeger died recently, a BBC announcer explained that he had written the song ‘Turn, turn, turn” (the Byrds' version is posted above). He had a little help: the song is straight from Book of Ecclesiastes with one word, ‘turn’, slotted in by Seeger. As he knew, these words have lost none of their power over the millennia.