Fraser Nelson

The Daily Telegraph is more supportive of the Conservative Party than any British newspaper, which is why its leader today – urging George Osborne to change course - is important. “The coalition’s economic policy is not working” it says, and goes on to urge a rupture with the failing policy. Its central recommendation is that corporation tax drops below Irish levels so Britain offers the lowest company tax in the European Union. Osborne could announce this on his 20 March budget. And he could spend 21 March listening to the sucking sound as companies started relocating to Britain.

Michael Gove's enemies will have savoured his defeat yesterday, and enjoyed every second of his Commons speech admitting that his pet project, the EBacc, was ‘a bridge too far’. Gove is fighting a war on many fronts — and he lost a battle. It doesn't happen often, which is precisely why it's memorable. I look at this in my Telegraph column today. Here are my main points: 1. The passion of Gove — and Adonis. Gove is just as passionate about the transformative power of education as Andrew Adonis and, I suspect, for the same reason. Both were born in modest circumstances: Adonis to a single father in Camden, Gove to a woman in Edinburgh who gave him up for adoption. Both had the very unusual opportunity of a first-class education.

Where was Andrew Dilnot in the Gordon Brown era? The head of the UK Statistics Authority has just rebuked the Prime Minister for telling porkies about debt on his ITV broadcast last week. CoffeeHousers will remember that the PM made the flatly untrue claim that: ‘though this government has had to make some difficult decisions, we are making progress. We’re paying down Britain’s debts.’ The truth is that his government will  increase Britain’s debt by 58 per cent, and by more over five years than Labour did over 13 years.  Just last week, we learned the national debt had hit £1,111 billion and it’s heading to £1,534 billion. Put this into perspective: the Libya campaign cost £200 million.

7.15pm A full house here at the IET in Savoy Place - our free press debate, sponsored by Brewin Dolphin, has been a sell-out. A stunning venue and an outstanding lineup. For the motion: Guido Fawkes, Richard Littlejohn and Tory MP John Whittingdale. Against: Max Mosley, Chris Bryant and the celebrity lawyer Charlotte Harris. Chaired by Andrew Neil. And the motion: Leveson is a fundamental threat to the free press. RICHARD LITTLEJOHN is up first. The Leveson inquiry, he said, was a cross between a Soviet show trial and Graham Norton show. The self-regarding liberal elite seized on an opportunity for this. Leveson was picking over the bones of a corpse: the News of the World was shut down by reader revulsion.

Frustrated with David Cameron? The perfect remedy lies in your newsagents today. Tony Blair has a a piece in the Mail on Sunday and his aspirant jedi padawan, David Miliband, has one in the Sunday Telegraph. Both serve a refreshing reminder of the stale, elitist, failed thinking that David Cameron swept aside with his historic referendum pledge last week. Having taken a break from frontline politics, both Blair and Miliband might have returned with fresh ideas for connecting Labour to the voters it alienated. Instead, both seem to have spent their time hanging out with business jet-set and, increasingly, speak as their envoys.

'George Osborne is under pressure to tear up his austerity programme after Boris Johnson called on the government to drop its ‘hair-shirt, Stafford Cripps agenda,' reports the delighted Guardian today. Even Boris is against it! Even he can see that the obvious solution to our debt crisis is even more debt! Except, as you’d expect, it’s all nonsense. Kamal Ahmed at the Telegraph got it right: Boris’s problem is with Osborne’s language: talking about pain, rather than recovery. He quotes Boris: 'We need to junk the rhetoric of austerity and be confident.

And then David Cameron has to go and spoil it all by telling porkies about what his government is doing to our national debt. The party election broadcast the Conservatives have just released is so astonishingly dishonest that it really would have disgraced Gordon Brown. In it, the Prime Minister tells an outright – how to put it? – untruth. He says:- “So though this government has had to make some difficult decisions, we are making progress. We’re paying down Britain’s debts.” listen to ‘David Cameron: "We're paying down Britain's debts" 23 Jan 13’ on Audioboo David Cameron’s policy is to increase Britain’s debt by 60 per cent, more than any European country. To increase it more over five years than Labour did over 13 years.

We can all overdo it a little at Christmas, but the government's monthly overdraft statement — which came in this morning — is of a different order. In December, HM Treasury spent £15.4 billion more than it received in tax, a worse result than December last year where the monthly deficit was £14.8 billion. And why? Well, growth has been sluggish (we may learn on Friday that the UK economy is shrinking again) so tax revenues have fallen. But, more worryingly, state spending seems to be running out of control too. The below graph, from Citi, sums it up. The blue is what is expected (from those fiscal Mystic Megs at the Office for Budget Responsibility) for 2012-13 and the pink is what we have seen in the first nine months of that period.

Not that it’s a great surprise, but Liam Fox has come out as an out-er - i.e., he'd vote to leave the European Union if it cannot be reformed. He has hinted at this before, writing that the idea of leaving the EU “holds no terror” for him but on Sunday Politics he explicitly told Andrew Neil that he’d prefer independence to the status quo. Once, that would made Fox a minority voice but now it’s the mainstream position – and one shared, I suspect, by at least a dozen of his Cabinet colleagues who have no yet gone on the record. If you’re happy with Britain’s EU membership, you occupy a fringe position in British politics. And you want to keep the status quo, Fox said with a not-entirely-respectful chuckle, ‘vote Liberal Democrat’.