Fraser Nelson

‘Balls urges tax cuts’, we’re told. Has he had a Damascene moment? Has the borrowed penny dropped? Nope, this is his longstanding and cynical campaign to cut VAT. Under the Labour years, when Balls was encouraging Brown to adopt a ‘scorched earth’ policy to the public finances, he urged against raising VAT to 20 per cent as Alistair Darling wanted. Not because he didn’t think it was necessary, but because he knew that if Darling didn’t do it, Osborne would. So VAT could be an election campaign tool, and then a stick with which to beat the wicked Tories (and the Lib Dems, who dropped the ‘VAT bombshell’ that they warned of). There is also politics: Tories prefer taxing consumption to taxing income.

The Spectator’s figures are out today, and I’m delighted to say that they show sales growing at their fastest rate in ten years — driven by our new digital formats. The above chart shows how things are moving. I thought CoffeeHousers might like to know a bit more about how we in 22 Old Queen St see it all. The magazine industry, like the rest of print, is going through something of a revolution. Readers are migrating to digital alternatives like Kindle, as there is no waiting for delivery. Kindle addicts like having their magazines and newspapers waiting for them in their pocket, available to read any time. As our readers changed, so has The Spectator. Our Kindle edition is no.

The Spectator's cover, a few weeks ago, borrowed one of The Sun's most famous headlines: ‘Gotcha’ — but, this time, with tabloid journalists caught in the trap. It was supposed to be a parody. But, this weekend, the Metropolitan Police arrested a further five journalists from The Sun using methods normally meted out to drug dealers: pulling them out of their beds, searching their houses for concealed evidence. No one has been charged, but all five are suspected of paying sources for information: i.e. ‘aiding and abetting misconduct in a public office ... and conspiracy in relation to both these offences.

There have been precious few people able to make sense of the crash. The main commentators didn’t see it coming — and so have focused their energies stressing how no man born of woman could have predicted it. But Nassim Taleb did. He has been a voice of sense, originality and common sense throughout, and David Cameron has been listening. The respect is mutual: Taleb even described Cameron as ‘the best hope we have left on this planet’ because he understood the dangers of deficits. If CoffeeHousers haven’t come across Taleb’s books, such as Fooled by Randomness and Black Swan, I can’t recommend them enough. I met him recently, and published the interview in this week’s magazine.

A small war has broken out over Lansley's NHS Bill — ConservativeHome has three Cabinet members attacking it. I find that shocking. At least a dozen want the Bill killed, and why ConHome found just three is beyond me. Politically, it's probably impossible for Cameron to drop it. But if it was torn up, I for one would shed no tears. For what it's worth, here's my take. It’s depressing to think that Alan Milburn’s NHS Plan of 2000 was both more radical and more sensible than what Andrew Lansley is serving up now. The whole debacle has shown politics at its most petty, partisan and pointless — a complete contrast to the coalition’s approach to school reform, which has been to fit rocket boosters to a very good Labour reform.

It’s unusual for The Guardian and The Spectator to agree on anything, but Seamus Milne and our own John R Bradley are sceptical about these Syrian rebels whom we’re being invited to support. Bradley was alone in predicting the Egyptian revolution, and argues in today’s magazine that the conventional wisdom is once again wrong. Who’s backing the rebels? The Qataris, keen to depose the last secular regime in the Arab world. And the Saudis and Israelis, whose hatred of Iran eclipses all other considerations: this isn’t about the Syrian people, but about depriving the ayatollahs of an ally. Some in the West also take the view that the enemy’s enemy is my friend — so the rebels must be good eggs.

The Twitter hashtag #BankerOutrage was launched by Radio Four yesterday summing up a very popular mood. It’s not unusual for bankers to be hated after crashes. After the South Sea Bubble burst in 1721, there were calls in the Lords for the bankers involved to be dumped in sacks filled with serpents and dropped in the Thames. But that was the immediate aftermath: what’s odd now is the timing. As we say in the leading article of this week’s Spectator, Hester had a bonus twice the size last year — and no one seemed to care. Now, it’s suddenly a crisis and Fred the Shred’s knighthood is a matter of urgency.

Any CoffeeHousers with a taste for schadenfreude should read David Miliband’s article in the New Statesman. We have to move beyond big government, he declares. We need a growth strategy. I’m not sure if any Labour leader has ever argued otherwise: maybe, as Miliband implies, it has found one now. But, as I ask in my Daily Telegraph column today, what’s worse: a party that’s stuck in 1983, or a modernising movement that’s aiming for 1987? But talk to any Tory, and it’s hard to find any who think the 2015 election is in the bag. Four factors should prevent us from writing off Labour’s chances: 1) David Cameron is brilliant, but just not (yet) at winning elections.

When it comes to defending the free market, and making the case for fiscal sanity, there's scarcely anyone better than David Cameron. He was on superb form in Davos yesterday, giving much-needed blunt advice to the continentals. ‘Eurozone countries must do everything possible to get to grips with their own debts,’ he said. And he's right. The snag, as I say in my Daily Telegraph column today, is that Cameron's definition of getting to grips with debt involves increasing it more than Labour planned to, more than France, Germany, Italy or Portugal. On the first sign of trouble, his government gave up on its deficit reduction timetable – it will now halve the deficit over five years, whereas Darling promised to do it in four.

ARK Schools, one of the leading City Academy providers, has just released another amazing set of results with GCSE passes 11 percentage points higher last year than were achieved in 2010. This is staggering progress, given that these schools are serving the same neighbourhoods with the same demographics as the council-run schools which they replaced. It is also a reminder that the City Academy programme, started by Tony Blair and Andrew Adonis and expanded by Michael Gove, can claim to be the most rapidly-vindicated social experiments in recent history. The results of ARK’s schools speak best for themselves: ARK’s formula clearly works, and I’d like to see it applied to many more schools rapidly.