Fraser Nelson is a Times columnist and a former editor of The Spectator.
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
HMS Ark Royal leaves Portsmouth for Turkey today to be dismantled and sold for scrap; the Harrier jets she once carried are being sold to the Americans for spare parts. She’s being decommissioned early as we can’t afford to keep her now. Times are tough, and hard choices need to be made. The same bulletin
Last night’s Eurovision was, as always, a collision of music, culture and politics. As always, the official British entry was dire – but, as always, the invisible hand of Britain’s world-class musicians lay behind many acts that did well. So it was with Denmark’s winner, Emmelie de Forest, whose song Only Teardrops won by quite
What a strange day. Lord Feldman, the Tory co-chairman, appears to have identified himself as the unnamed Cameron ally reported by several newspapers as referring to party activists as ‘swivel-eyed loons’. He strenuously denies making the comments, and for good measure says he is consulting lawyers. Here’s what he has to say: ‘I am very
The mis-selling of higher education is one of the least remarked-upon scandals of our time, but anyone under 40 should be familiar with the concept. You’re told, at school, that a degree will make you far better-off. Politicians even put a price on it: a degree will make you, on average, £100,000 better-off in your
Britain is a stickler for tradition and each May we now observe a relatively new one: we bomb in the Eurovision Song Contest. The protocol now is well-established. Our entry is chosen by a BBC bureaucrat who appears to see the whole thing as a bad joke. We send out Bonnie Tyler/Engelbert Humperdinck etc to face an army
The Daily Telegraph has an interesting splash tomorrow. Its headline reads: ‘Shaun Bailey, the Prime Minister’s only black aide, was ‘frozen out by David Cameron’s clique’. It quotes a ‘friend of’ Mr Bailey, a Hammersmith candidate once given the prime warm-up slot to Cameron in the Tory conference. This friend says rather a lot, and
If the devil were to conduct an experiment into mankind’s ability to resist temptation, it would look something like Stanford University. It is built in one of the world’s most agreeable climates and everyone dresses as if they have just stepped off the beach – which lies only half an hour away. Hammocks lie between
Peter Hain is pessimistic about Ed Miliband’s chances, in spite of what the bookies say*. ‘If a general election was held tomorrow, Labour wouldn’t win a majority,’ he writes in Progress Online. ‘The truth is if we want a majority in 2015, we need to be performing better than we are now.’ He also zeroes
You know something is going right with the world when Charles Moore’s biography of Margaret Thatcher is Number 1 in the Guardian bookshop. Little wonder: even if you’re no fan of The Lady, it’s one of the best political biographies that you’ll read. And tonight, Charles will discuss his book with Andrew Neil at Cadogan
No one can ever recover from being wrongly accused of sexual assault, which is why I welcomed the government’s plan to ‘extend anonymity in rape cases to defendants‘. Turns out that Coalition Agreement pledge was a blunder: the Tories thought it was a Liberal Democrat idea and vice versa. When they worked out that neither
What few results there have been so far suggest that UKIP has scored about a quarter of the vote and gained more seats than Labour. A ‘phenomenal performance’ says Prof John Curtice. Nigel Farage now looks like the main winner, suggesting that his party is mutating from an EU protest party into a being broader
One of the better policies of this government is its offering massive databases up for public scrutiny. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, argues David Cameron, and outsiders can scrutinise what the government is doing and point to flaws. With commendable openness the Department for Education asked Deloitte to look at its massive pupil database last
Given that the Bank of England was set up by a Scot, Alex Salmond may expect that an independent Scotland would be automatically eligible to use the pound. Not so, George Osborne has replied, in fact it’s unlikely that England would let it. The Chancellor takes a surprisingly keen interest in the campaign to save
Yesterday, thousands of runners in the London Marathon converged on the greatest target in the world. Winston Churchill was the first to see the problem. ‘With our enormous metropolis here… [we are] a kind of tremendous fat cow, a valuable cow tied up to attract the beasts of prey,’ he told the Commons in 1934.
For years, words ‘skills’ and ‘crisis’ have been joined in British political discourse. It’s a problem that no one seems able to crack and on May 2nd, The Spectator is holding a conference to get to the bottom of it. Labour excelled at explaining the problem. When Gordon Brown went through his phase of ennobling
Guests at The Spectator’s schools conference on Thursday arrived via the stunning grounds of Westminster School (above), one of the best not just in the country but the world. It was fitting setting. The great irony about the British schools debate is that while our state schools may languish at 25th place in the global rankings,
Thatchermania has died down now, and I’ve personally stayed out of it. The quality of commentary from people around at the time has been outstanding, not least The Spectator’s own Charles Moore. The Thatcher drama is one where I can’t even claim to have been a spectator. I was not into politics when I was
Fitch has today followed Moody’s in downgrading Britain from AAA to AA+. The reason? George Osborne is borrowing far too much. In its verdict, it said that gross debt “will peak at 101% of GDP in 2015-16…and will only gradually decline from 2017-18.” The Chancellor, of course, had once set a rule to “ensure that debt
Will Michael Gove’s reforms outlast him? They are perhaps this government’s single greatest accomplishment. Within three years it has gone from legislation to a nascent industry, and much of it on display at yesterday’s Spectator education conference, which the Education Secretary addressed. But towards the end, he raised an important point: how much of this