Fraser Nelson is a Times columnist and a former editor of The Spectator.
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The Clinton aide James Carville was once asked that, were he to be reincarnated, what he’d like to come back as. “I used to want to come back as the president or the pope or a .400 baseball hitter,” he replied. “But now I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate
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Does it matter if the poor are given a bad eduction? Christine Blower, head of the National Union of Teachers, has just been on BBC1 Sunday Politics. She’s very influential (as her £155,000 pay package suggests) especially at a time when Labour policy is aligning behind NUT policy. When confronted with figures showing how the
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In setting up the Leveson Inquiry, David Cameron made a major mistake. He accepted the premise – so powerfully advocated by Murdoch’s rivals – that hacking was a problem because the Dirty Digger was so wicked. The inquiry should have been into the black market for illegal information, of which the hacking scandal exposed a
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David Dinsmore, the former editor of the Scottish Sun, has just been named new editor of The Sun replacing Dominic Mohan. Dinsmore was very well-liked in Glasgow by those who worked for him (he’s also a Spectator reader, which speaks well of anyone). Educated at Strathallan School (where he wrote for its shortlived socialist newspaper Turn
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Russell Brand made a good point on Question Time last night. If a party derives half of its funding from a group of people, it’s not going to do anything to annoy that group. He was speaking in the (incorrect) premise that the Tories are bankrolled by the banks, bit his overall conclusion was spot
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It’s not often that M&G’s retail bond team link to education pieces; they tend to be more interested in inflation threats and sovereign defaults. But this morning, the guys at @bondvigilantes drew investors’ attention to research published in the current issue of The Spectator on the true economic cost of British educational failure. It makes
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The victory of Hassan Rouhani has stunned pundits, and it seems even Iranians can’t quite believe it. He is a moderate (if not, quite, a reformer) who defeated five conservatives. He was helped by the fact that other moderates had stood back to give him a clear run. His victory was massive – 51pc of the
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It’s official – Hassan Rouhani has been declared the new President of Iran with 51pc of the vote. He’s a cleric, a moderate and a polyglot (speaking English, German, French, Russian and Arabic). “Let’s end extremism,” he said during a campaign speech. “We have no other option than moderation.” He took swipes at the Basij,
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Now that Barack Obama has decided to arm the ‘good’ rebels in Syria, it’s more likely than ever that Britain will follow suit. The G8 summit next week in Northern Ireland may well turn into a pre-war summit, which will certainly be interesting seeing as Putin will also be there. The Russians may respond by
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The Labour years can, in retrospect, be seen as a massive experiment into the link between cash and education. Gordon Brown almost doubled spending per pupil over the past decade, the biggest money injection in the history of state schooling. But as he did so, England hurtled down the international league tables. It now languishes
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From the moment that the Sunday Times caught Tim Yeo offering to advise energy companies for cash, it was clear that his chairmanship of the energy and climate change select committee was untenable. Yet he’s coming to this conclusion slowly. It has taken him until now to decide he’ll “step aside,” apparently under pressure from Labour members of the
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You can accuse Ed Balls of a great many things (and we do), but he doesn’t do gaffes. His interviews are always worth paying close attention to, because every soundbite is carefully-considered, weighed for its political potency and constantly reused. Anyone who missed his interview with Andrew Neil yesterday should catch it (here) because –
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Ed Miliband argued this morning that the Labour party ought to be more focused on people working. ‘The clue’s in the name,’ he said. The irony is that Labour gave up on working people some time ago, and used the boom to keep five million Brits on out-of-work benefit while foreign-born workers accounted for 99.9%
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Jo Johnson is now in situ, Christopher Lockwood has started his two-year sabbatical from the Economist and David Cameron’s new policy unit is in in place and ready to go producing ideas of how to win the 2015 election. But word is that they’re not entirely overflowing with ideas, and believe it will be tough
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Does marriage matter anymore? Not so long ago, David Cameron was foremost amongst those giving an unfashionable ‘yes’ to this question. It became his signature theme, the closest he had to a Blair-style ‘irreducible core’. It seemed, at the time, as if a 1979-style realignment was underway. The Labour Party was being sucked into the
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I would have loved to have been in the room when David Cameron’s advisers were thinking of an acronym for the new anti-terror committee. Something that sounded scary enough, but not too Monty Python. They eventually went for TERFOR, according to the Mail on Sunday, although it’s still unclear what the T will stand for.
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From his base in New York, Rupert Murdoch knows where to get the best analysis of British politics: The Spectator. He has just Tweeted that David Cameron is in trouble, after reading James Forsyth’s brilliant political column. It’s easy to see why he was so struck. As so often, James’ tells you more about what’s
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The reporting of yesterday’s murder was driven not by journalists, but by eyewitnesses quickly able to share what they saw. Here is one extraordinary chain of tweets by a rapper, Boya Deemarko, who says that one of the murderers fired a gun but lost his finger when the weapon backfired. Ohhhhh myyyy God!!!! I just see
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The Muslim Council of Britain has denounced the Woolwich murder and has been joined by hundreds of Muslims who have taken to Twitter to voice disgust over the idea that Islam could have been be invoked in such a barbaric act. Here are a few of them: I can’t tell you how sick I am
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Great news for all progressives: a private school has been effectively been nationalised. Queen Elizabeth Grammar in Blackburn, founded in 1509, is to enter the state sector as one of Michael Gove’s free schools. Education that had previously been affordable only by the rich will now be open to all in Blackburn. It’s one of