Fraser Nelson

Only in politics could you get someone appointed to a top job with zero experience. Quite often, you hear laments about how the UK has a defence secretary who has never fought, a Chancellor who has never run anything bigger than a raffle, a health secretary who has only ever been a user of the NHS. In America, by contrast, the president gets to pick who he likes — so you can have genuine experts. But there are exceptions to this rule. One is John Nash, an entrepreneur and venture capitalist who runs a charity which has set up a very successful school. He has just been appointed schools minister: a round peg in a round hole. And Barack Obama has shown less interest in outside experience than any modern president (as the above graph from JP Morgan shows).

The Cameron/Clegg press conference did not teach us very much — save that the chemistry between the two is as good as ever, that they can still finish each other's sentences and exchange bad jokes. The Prime Minister's bad joke related to one of the comments under his interview with Matthew d'Ancona yesterday where he (in effect) said he wanted to stay in No10 until 2020. When asked about this today, the PM replied that a commentator on the Telegraph Online complained: ‘It's already 20:51 and you're still here.’ The assembled journalists treated his joke with the same respectful silence that they did to Clegg's ‘unvarnished truth’ joke. ‘You're all very slow today,’ Cameron chided.

Not that anyone has noticed, but the Kyoto Protocol expired on 31 December, with  carbon emissions up by 58pc over 1990 levels - instead the 5pc cut the signatories envisaged. All that fuss for worse-than-nothing. Kyoto has not been replaced, because a new era of climate change rationalism is slowly taking root. As Nigel Lawson predicted, the hysteria of the last few years is cooling. There’s no point legislating for change that’s not going to happen. No point taxing the poor out of the sky (or off the roads) if it won’t make the blindest bit of difference to the trajectory of global warming. To be sure, countries responsible for 15pc of emissions have signed an extension of Kyoto.

At my first-ever Tory party conference, I saw William Rees-Mogg leave a reception and chased him down the corridor like a groupie. I asked him if he had any tips: since college days, I'd marvelled at how he managed to write so clearly, compellingly and accessibly on such a variety of subjects. He had no reason to talk to a nonentity like me, but was kind enough to offer three tips. He said he took inspiration from Ben Jonson's essays: the originals, he said, were still the best. Next, he had about six topics on the boil at any one moment. There wasn't time to properly research a topic and write it up in one day, so he'd spend the week working up topics that were interesting. Having done the research and thought through the arguments, he'd wait for a news peg and then run it.

An friend of mine in the City just sent me what is perhaps the shortest email I've ever received. The text just read "WTF?" with an attachment: the below graph, from today's borrowing data, showing that underlying state spending was up 5.5pc in the three months November, compared to the same period last year. The graph speaks best for itself:- So what the, em, blazes is going on? Simply that there is a detachment between the government's rhetoric (preaching against the evils of debt) and what the government is doing (cuts averaging <1pc a year and national debt rising faster than that if any Eurozone country). This combination is making credit rating agencies increasingly uneasy as they decide whether 2013 will be the year of the British downgrade.

Did the police stitch up Andrew Mitchell like a kipper? I was at a No.10 reception earlier this evening and a section of a room drained when Michael Crick's extraordinary report about Plebgate came on Channel 4 News.The police claimed that Mitchell's swearing shocked 'several members of public': CCTV footage, released by the Cabinet Office, showed there was only one onlooker (below, with his head blotted out). This looks stranger still when you compare it to the account of supposed witness — who we now know to be a copper. He emailed John Randall, the deputy chief whip and his local MP: 'I was with my nephew and was hoping to catch a glance of a famous politician.

Remember the Lawson boom? Gordon Brown did not let you forget it. His phrase to describe the Lawson-Major-Lamont era, 'boom and bust', was hammered relentlessly into voters' minds. But only now, five years after the crash, is the full extent of the Brown bubble becoming clear. A note from Citi today throws this into focus - with obvious implications about the future. If the past 'prosperity' was a debt-fuelled illusion, then what's to say we will 'recover'? The below is an 'output gap' graph that shows the size of the UK economy, relative to its potential. The Lawson boom is there, in blue. But the Brown bubble has only recently been discovered. It's a hell of a thing to miss. In pink is what those muppets at the IMF told us at the time.

Standard & Poor's has delivered its verdict on George Osborne's mini-Budget. It has reduced its outlook to negative, as per Citi's predictions (which I blogged about last week). Citi said the S&P thumbs-down would happen in the new year: it took days. S&P now thinks there's at least a 33pc chance that the UK will lose its AAA rating. Little wonder, given that UK debt is rising faster than any country in Europe. S&P says the UK could lose its coveted AAA status... "in particular as a result of a delayed and uneven economic recovery, or a weakening of political commitment to consolidation." I suspect this refers to what James Forsyth refers to as Osborne's St Augustine approach to deficit reduction: Lord, give me fiscal discipline. But not yet.

On Monday, I interviewed Michael Gove for the new Christmas double issue of The Spectator. It’s out tomorrow but here’s a longer version, arranged in subheadings so CoffeeHousers can skip over bits they’re not interested in. This is the picture that stands behind Michael Gove’s desk: an imposing McCarthy-era poster which saying: 'Sure, I want to fight Communism - but how?' In their less charitable moments, Tories may argue that his Department of Education is as good a place as any to start. The strength of its grip over state schools has long been the subject of political laments and Yes, Minister sketches. Confronting the educational establishment was too much for the Blair reformers and even the Thatcher government.

Britain will lose its AAA rating within 18 months because George Osborne 'no longer has credible plans to put the debt/GDP ratio on a stable or declining path' according to Citi. Its verdict is worth reading in full (pdf) and is important because it adds weight to the idea that — as a result of Osborne’s lack of progress on the deficit — 2013 will be the year of the British downgrade. What did it for Michael Saunders, the Citi analyst, was seeing Osborne take what James Forsyth refers to in this week’s political column as the St Augustine approach to deficit reduction: 'Lord, let me balance the books but not yet.' This eats away at Osborne's credibility.