Fraser Nelson

What part of ‘no’ don’t they understand? Our politicians have proudly unveiled their new plan to license the press, as if this was is in their power to do so. In fact, the press in Britain has been free from political interference for generations. The British government simply does not have the power to regulate the press, so it’s not clear why ministers have wasted their time acting as if this is their problem to solve. The mechanics of the new charter released today are not the issue. What the politicians propose is a near-duplication of the regulation which the press has already  to set up: the £1 million fines, the toughest system in the Western world.

A few weeks ago the Prime Minister of the liberated Libya, Ali Zeidan was sitting in 10 Downing St talking to David Cameron. A few hours ago he was kidnapped, in what appears to be retaliation for the seizure of an al-Qaeda leader by the Americans in Tripoli a few days ago. The Libyan government has said Zeidan was 'taken at dawn this morning by gunmen to an unknown place for unknown reasons.' He had been living staying in the Corinthia Hotel, sister to the luxurious Corinthia Hotel in Whitehall. One guard at the hotel described it as an 'arrest' according to Reuters. Libya's justice minister says it was a kidnap, and that there are CCTV stills of Ali Zeidan being hauled out of the building by heavies (right). Word is that the heavies were loosely connected to the government.

The very fact that a Cabinet member has stood up in the House of Commons to make a statement on the future of newspapers suggests there's something going rather wrong in our democracy. For three centuries, newspapers have not been toys in the political train set. Britain has operated on an unspoken principle of liberty, so firmly embedded in the national DNA that the separation between government and the press did not need spelt out in a constitution. Today, a medieval group known as the Privy Council (in fact, an octet of politicians) has decided to reject the newspaper industry’s plans for self-regulation in favour of politicians' plans for press regulation.

My first job in journalism was with the Glasgow Herald, which then had a bar built in to the complex. I was taken under the wing of the legendary James Freeman, who taught me the ways of the jungle. 'You see that journalists always drink in groups of three?' he told me in the bar one lunchtime. 'That’s so, when one goes to the toilet, the other two can slag him off.' And it’s true: my profession is notoriously bitchy. I was reminded of this when switching on the BBC news to find, yet again, that the transgressions of the Daily Mail and its spat with Ed Miliband is deemed the most important story of the day. I look at this in my Daily Telegraph column today. The intro to Rod Liddle’s column in the magazine this week will strike a chord with many commentators on Fleet St.

David Cameron has just been interviewed by Sarah Montague on Radio Four, who rather put him through his paces. She teased out an interesting position he is adopting to the growing concern about his Help to Buy mortgage subsidies. He defends himself by saying he will liberate those 'trapped' in rented accommodation and casts his critics as cold-hearted rich kids.

Here’s what jumped out at me from David Cameron’s interview with Andrew Marr in Manchester this morning: Tax cuts: the Tory weapon 'As this economy has started to recover, it’s very difficult for people to make ends meet. Their wages are relatively fixed, and the prices are going up. That’s why cutting people’s taxes is so important. That’s why lifting people out of the first £10,000 of income tax is so vital. That’s why freezing the council tax matters.' So Cameron acknowledges Miliband's premise, that the cost of living is an issue, then presents tax cuts as the solution. Precisely the right strategy, as tax cuts are bankable and Miliband's claim to freeze energy bills is less so.

A banker of my acquaintance went to Switzerland skiing this winter. A luxury he normally could not afford, but he’d just remortgaged thanks to George Osborne’s Funding For Lending scheme and saved a packet. To his amazement, he was being bailed out by the Chancellor – he didn’t need the money but thought he’d take it if it was going. The cash certainly tricked down - to the après-ski champagne bars of Verbier. The Chancellor’s stimulus makes the cheapest loans only available to the rich (ie, those with at least 40 per cent equity in their house) and like all of the Treasury’s cheap debt wheezes it was just another subsidy to a grossly overpaid consumer who really, really didn’t need it.

When the Damian McBride scandal blew up, Ed Balls was quick to distance himself from his former colleague saying he spoke to 'Mr McBride' once or twice and had dealings with him when they worked in Treasury but had not had much contact since. I remember Ben Brogan (then at the Mail) blogging: 'Liar, liar, pants on fire' (they have taken his blog down since). It summed up the reaction of most  at Westminster. The widespread assumption was that Damian McBride and Ed Balls were key members of a close-knit group of people (eight of them, I later found out) around Gordon Brown. McBride is a guest in this week's Spectator podcast, and I asked him about Balls. His account is difficult to reconcile with Ed Balls's 'Damian who?

In his Guardian column tomorrow, Jonathan Freedland writes that Ed Miliband reckons he’ll "get a kicking from the Daily Telegraph" for his lurch to the left, but his ‘gamble’ is that he’ll survive it. The Times and the Daily Mail have not given his remarkable speech much of a better reception (above). All three newspapers can see what’s at stake here: a very dangerous principle, dug out of its 1970s grave and held up for applause at the Labour Party conference. It is now okay for a PM to govern by issuing edicts to private companies and having them do what he wants. Today, Miliband has said his government would issue two kinds of threats. One is to property companies: ‘build more houses, or we’ll confiscate your land!’.

Why does the right like Labour’s Jon Cruddas so much? Because he’s actually a conservative. He’s just admitted as much in a fringe meeting, hosted by my colleagues at the Centre for Social Justice. He was talking about his own politics: conservative, he said. But in a Labour way. 'I don’t go in for the self-analysis that much,' he said, but he liked the 'romantic traditions' of Labour and part of it was always about defence of family and traditions from 'relentless commodification of our lives... and that’s the tradition I come from'. A tradition which had been crushed by the Fabian element in recent decades, he said, but one that’s making a comeback.