Brown’s Black Saturday

This is Brown’s Black Saturday. He could have won even on these polls, but it would have been a fight rather than a massacre. And this is what he balked at. He has shown himself to be a graduate of the Scooby Doo school of conflict: he saw danger, yelped “yikes” and skedaddled. Fleet Street

James Forsyth

Why Brown bottled it

The News of the World front page tomorrow blasts, “Poll kills election.” The details of the poll, which the News of the World kindly advanced to us, are grim for Labour and explain why Gordon Brown felt he couldn’t take the risk of going early.  77% think the government has done a bad job on

James Forsyth

Tories 3 points ahead in the country as a whole

It just keeps getting better and better for the Conservatives and worse and worse for Gordon Brown. A new YouGov poll shows that the Tories are now 3 points ahead of Labour—a remarkable turnaround from last Saturday’s YouGov poll which had them 11 points behind. The only potential dampener on Tory spirits tonight is the

Fraser Nelson

Another blow to Brown

Adam Boulton, political editor of Sky News, is famously fair minded. That makes his verdict on Brown simply devastating. He has just described this as “one of the worst blows to a serving prime minister that I can remember in quarter of a century of covering politics.” He blames the debacle on Brown’s advisers. “If

Fraser Nelson

Why Brown bottled it: Six point Tory lead in the marginals

Why did Gordon Brown call off the election? The News of the World, where I am a columnist, tells us tomorrow. It is the only newspaper to have polled in the marginal seats (a horribly expensive process) and the results exposes the type of information which Brown has been chewing over. The results are devastating.

Fraser Nelson

No November election

Gordon Brown has called off the election. He may appear on Andrew Marr tomorrow to tell us why. I am in a rather unusual position here – I can tell you why, but not until 4.45pm. Stay tuned.

James Forsyth

Will he go now?

As Gordon Brown prepares for tomorrow’s crunch meeting on whether or not to call an election the case against going early is getting stronger. A poll for the Daily Politics found that 57% of voters think Brown would be putting Labour’s interests ahead of those of the country if he went now; suggesting that Labour

Brown bottles out, no election this year

Gordon Brown has ruled out an election this year following a poll of marginal seats that showed Labour significantly behind the Tories. No election is now expected until 2009. Coffee House has reaction and analysis to this news. Click here to read the latest from our political team.  

Martin Vander Weyer

A chastened City

Can we make a link between the chopping of 1,500 jobs, mostly in London and New York, by the Swiss banking giant UBS, and the news that the City of London Corporation has come up with a £300 million contribution to the financing of Crossrail, the long-awaited Heathrow-to-Docklands transport link? Well, connecting unrelated news events

OCTOBER WINE CLUB

This is a cellar that looks like a cellar, with stacks of wine in wooden cases, some of it covered in dust and cobwebs, the finest stored in a locked cage with a creaking door. In spite of that, they have a modern approach to pricing. The business has an enormous turnover, and the inevitable

Taking the rap

In Competition No. 2514 you were invited to recast a fairy tale as a rap. I thought that fairy tales might translate well into the language of rap. After all, violence is a dominant theme in both genres (especially in the Grimms’ original x-rated versions, which featured scenes of murder, mutilation, cannibalism, infanticide and incest

A man worthy to be Prime Minister

Ten years after New Labour came to power, it is remarkable that the unions can still hold us all to ransom. This issue of The Spectator has gone to press a day earlier than usual, to minimise the risk of disruption to our readers from the threatened postal strike. It is depressing that such precautions

Notting Hill Nobody | 6 October 2007

Sunday Am shattered from lugging huge bag of policies around. Felt like asking Mr Gove what exactly he’d put in his blasted School Reforms, but just about controlled self. Plus, the poor girls working for Gids are having to cope with a Mulberry hold-all each of tax cuts so I suppose I shouldn’t complain. Anyway,

A symbol of change – but is she the real thing?

It wasn’t hard to see what was in it for President Nicolas Sarkozy when he appointed Christine Lagarde as France’s new finance minister in June this year. After a glittering career in international law, Lagarde had become a star in American business circles: the 30th most powerful woman in the world, according to that ultimate

Penguin’s irrational exuberance

What’s the biggest threat to the stability of the global economy today? Derivatives? Hedge funds? The credit crunch? Actually it could be Pearson, the company that owns the Financial Times. How so? By allowing its Penguin imprint to pay $8.5 million for the memoirs of Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve.