Fraser Nelson

The Daily Telegraph last night released the audio of Maria Miller's special adviser implying very clearly that its reporter should lay off investigating the Culture Secretary's expenses because she was deciding about the future of a free press. Here's the key quote: 'I should just flag up as well, while you're on it that when she doorstepped him, she got Maria's father, who's just had a [removed] and come out of [removed]. And Maria has obviously been having quite a lot of editors' meetings around Leveson at the moment. So I am just going to flag up that connection for you to think about.' We knew about the comments at the time — the Telegraph is not a newspaper easily bullied — but to hear it now is still shocking.

‘I’ve come to exorcise you lot,’ said Tristram Hunt cheerfully, as he turned up to deliver the keynote speech in The Spectator’s schools conference today. He had come to explain why free schools, a project this magazine proudly supports, are going wrong. His speech was as elegant and clever as it was wrong, which is why it’s worth studying. We’ll post the audio of his speech soon, but here’s my take. Hunt started by claiming the free school system is in meltdown, because a few of them have failed. He mentioned IES Breckland in Suffolk. Then Al-Madinah free school in Derby - so bad, he said, that Ofsted had to invent a new category of dysfunction. The Discovery New School in Crawley has closed.

Yesterday, George Osborne dedicated himself the mission of 'full employment'. Today, Michael Gove has given a speech declaring that the Conservatives are the 'party of social justice'. This is not positioning - it's simply stating the obvious. Thanks to Gove, the best hope a council estate kid has of dodging the local sink school is for a new school to open nearby. The Gove reforms don't help the rich - the education system works fine for them. The best state schools are filled with the state pupils from the richest backgrounds. Ed Balls was sent private, as his dad (who used to teach at Eton) had wisely saved money and rightly sought to invest this in his child. The same is true for Tristram Hunt's parents.

Our much-loved colleague, Clarissa Tan, passed away in the early hours of this morning. We’re all stunned here at 22 Old Queen Street – she had been fighting cancer for some time, but until a few weeks ago she had very few symptoms. Now, she has gone. I first met her seven years ago, just after she had won the Spectator’s Shiva Naipaul creative writing prize. She was living in Singapore but we kept in touch by email, and I was struck by her gorgeous use of language, her eye for a story, her ability to understand any subject – no matter how complex – and write about it with humour and insight. Even in emails, she seemed incapable of writing a sentence that didn’t put a smile on your face. She had a potent combination of a hard head and a light pen.

Some of the best journalists in Britain rarely, if ever, have their names in print. One of them is my colleague Peter Robins, the genius chief sub editor (or, technically, production editor) of The Spectator. In his Times column today (£), Matthew Parris has a story about Peter. Here it is: 'If you sometimes feel you’re getting gobbledegook from this columnist you should realise how much worse gobbledegook you’d get were it not for that most self-effacing of species, the sub-editor. I blush to remember the errors from which this page’s subs have rescued me.

Getting to the truth of a Budget is far easier under George Osborne's new system. His creation, the Office for Budget Responsibility, now writes its own report  (pdf here) and it's like having your own mole in the Treasury flag up what the Chancellor would rather gloss over*. I read its report over the weekend - it's too rich a document to skim on Budget day. I found a few charts that CoffeeHousers may be interested in. The graphs are all about Osborne's decision to defer tough decisions - what James Forsyth brilliantly called his Saint Augustine tendency: give me fiscal discipline, Oh Lord - but not yet.

George Osborne rather glossed over the single most solid piece of good news in the Budget today: the Jobs Miracle. His pensions announcement means that tomorrow’s papers are likely to skip over it too. But it’s worth looking at – the government seems genuinely baffled as to why so many people are finding work. As I wrote in my last Telegraph column, the Treasury does not seem to recognise a supply-side, cross-departmental success when it bites them on the nose. I’m just back from the annual Spectator Budget presentation, sponsored by Aberdeen Asset Management. We spoke a lot about this - the below graph sums it up... As my earlier blog on the "six scary graphs" shows, almost all of George Osborne's initial forecasts have proven to be laughably optimistic.

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_13_March_2014_v4.mp3" title="Toby Young and Fraser Nelson discuss the last stand of Michael Gove"] Listen [/audioplayer]Tristram Hunt seems delighted today that Britain’s first profit-seeking school has been deemed ‘inadequate’ by Ofsted. The scores of council-run failing schools, several in his Stoke constituency, don’t seem to be worthy of his ire. But when a free school stumbles, in Suffolk, he declares this to be… ‘…more evidence of the damage David Cameron’s Free School policy is doing to school standards. The lack of local oversight and a policy that allows unqualified teachers into classrooms on a permanent basis is the wrong approach.