Fraser Nelson

Listen to Isabel Hardman and James Forsyth discuss the 2013 spending review: listen to ‘Spending review 2013: the Coffee House analysis’ on Audioboo.

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 everybody." The bond market has a huge power over George Osborne, whose entire project is based on being able to borrow at rock bottom rates. A month ago, the Chancellor was being charged just 1.9pc on new loans. As of today, it has shot to 2.53pc. Look at how the market has behaved in recent weeks:- Does this matter? Yes, if you're borrowing £3,000 a second.

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 tiny part. Hacking is done by skip tracers, a phrase you never heard in the inquiry because it acknowledges the existence of a wider industry. Buyers are insurance companies, policemen, cuckolded husbands – anyone. The Spectator is (as far as I’m aware) the only publication to have drawn attention to the fact by running a piece by a reformed hacker (here) explaining how his market worked. This narrative didn’t suit anyone.

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 vote - and the Iranian authorities seem to have made no attempt to conceal it. There was no need for a second vote. The supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has congratulated the 64-year-old Glasgow-educated Rouhani:- "I urge everyone to help the president-elect and his colleagues in the government, as he is the president of the whole nation." The quotes coming through from Iranian votes show a mixture of surprise and jubilation. Here is a selection.

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 committee. Committee chairmen are elected nowadays, so what other members of the committee matters in a way it didn't used to. And Yeo, who took £140,000 from various commercial interests last year, will now have become an embarrassment to the green movement more generally. Those who regard renewable energy as a massive racket will see in him the embodiment of their suspicion: an MP on the take.

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% of the rise in employment. The Conservatives, with their revolutionary Universal Credit, want to make work pay - and save lives rather than save money. I tweeted earlier on today that the Conservatives can be seen as the new workers’ party. This drew a response from the two of the left-wingers I most admire: Polly Toynbee and Billy Bragg. Like many 40-year-olds, I grew up with Billy’s music.

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 to improve on the inherited agenda. This is true to an extent, as the Coalition Agreement was pretty radical. Then, ministers wanted to achieve a Moore’s Law-style expansion of Free Schools, elimination of the deficit and reconstruction of a dysfunctional welfare state. Any one of those three would have been more than Labour achieved in 13 years . I always thought that, instead of the Queen’s Speech, they should give a progress report on that original agenda.

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 vortex of its own economic failure. Its social failure was just as profound: it had tested to destruction the idea that more welfare makes countries stronger or fairer. And study after study showed that the institution of marriage was easily the most powerful weapon every developed to promote health, wealth and education. In Cameron, we seemed to have leader willing to say so. In my Telegraph column today, I look at what happened.

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 really going on in SW1 than most newspapers put together. As you’d expect from the single best-informed journalist in Westminster. And he's right, even by James' standards, this week's column is outstanding. Read the full thing here. Of course, Rupe is not the only New York-based journalist who has worked out how to get the best dope about what’s happening in Britain.