Fraser Nelson is a Times columnist and a former editor of The Spectator.
According to the Sunday Times, poor old Shaun Woodward is getting the blame for inspiring Brown’s mendacious “Labour investment v Tory cuts” line. As if. This is the work of Ed Balls, and his trademark belief that the public can be easily fooled on such issues because their eyes glaze over when you mention statistics.
Many CoffeeHousers will give a horse laugh to the idea of “green shoots” – especially the idea of Gordon Brown winning a fourth term because a grateful nation will thank him for a recovered economy. It’s a delusion, nothing surer, and the same one Callaghan and Major suffered from. In both cases, there were firm
I’ve just been on the BBC1 Breakfast sofa doing the “Brown lies on spending” debate with Nick Watt of The Guardian. That they invited us on a mass audience programme to discuss statistical fibs is an indication of how badly all this is backfiring on Gordon Brown. This debate may have started in the blogosphere
How do you explain what a “zero per cent rise” is? Michael Ellam, Brown’s outgoing press secretary, had this task earlier today and I went along to the lobby to hear him. His answer hints at what I suspect will be an almighty U-turn from the government on cuts. Brown was “interrupted” he said –
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way” Cameron said on Monday – and today, Brown finally agreed to do it the easy way. He seems to have dropped his Big Lie – that public spending will rise after the election. He’s doing it in stages, so today we had the rather
In the FT, John Kay has written one of those columns that quietly sums up the calamitous cost of Brown/Balls fiscal model. He concludes that we’ll have to raise some £70bn of taxes and then inflate our way out of debt—and this is a theme worth looking at in greater detail because I suspect it
The sun-capturing atrium of Portcullis House is no substitute for the Californian coast but it may at least help Steve Hilton acclimatise. He is now back from his year-long absence — though he is still dressed as if he is heading for the beach. It is a reminder of the inverted sartorial hierarchy of the
Ed Balls has just called me up about my post from this morning , hopping mad. He instructed me to “take that post down now”. I thought he was joking: has there been some change to the constitution where ministers now have power over the media? But he was deadly serious. “You should not call
Ed Balls has been sounding increasingly desperate since his thwarted attempt to become Chancellor. He has started to hijack radio interviews, splurging out concocted claims about the Tories no matter what he is asked. But this morning, he used outright lies. People exaggerate in politics, they interpret and even stretch the truth until the elastic
Here is my top half dozen points from Cameron’s angry, feisty, Brown’s-a-liar press conference today. 1. GO AHEAD, BROWN, MAKE MY DAY “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. I can just go on and on, question time after question time, revealing the cuts that he himself is planning. Or
How long can a Prime Minister in a democracy lie to his country and get away with it? Gordon Brown is trying to find out. His Big Lie – that his published plans do not involve a cut in public services – would not have withstood a Spending Review, which would have spelled out departmental
As promised, here’s the full story of those immigration statistics that I obtained from the ONS. In our new e-world, I can pass on all the results to you – and they’re worth discussing. The figures show the extent to which Brown’s “boom” was a mirage built not just on debt, but foreign labour. Most
Does it matter if immigrants have taken (or created) all the new jobs in the British private sector? I reveal this in my News of the World column today, as the key fact from a data request I made from the ONS. It’s a divisive topic, and even exploring it make ministers feel uncomfortable. But this ‘don’t ask, don’t
There was no mistaking the sadistic zeal with which Labour MPs bounded into the lobbies to vote for John Bercow on Monday. The whole election had been an unexpected gift to them: a chance to foist on David Cameron a Speaker who is loathed by the Conservative party. When Mr Bercow promised to serve ‘no
So far today I have received six text messages about Michael Jackson’s death – five of them wicked jokes that I shant repeat. The first just said “condolences” – sent from a friend who has long teased me for defending Jackson in pub arguments. Here’s why. For all his wackiness he was, he was by
How will the Tories cuts council work? The Guardian has an interesting piece today, laying out some contours (which will be not entirely unfamiliar to CoffeeHousers). But there is much more to the story – albeit a story which is still being moulded. Much of Tory policy is being formed in response to what they
David Cameron devoted all six questions to a simple theme: Gordon Brown lied to the House of Commons last week when he said capital expenditure was rising every year to the Olympics. As we pointed out on Coffee House at the time, the figures are falling (see the graph above). Brown’s strategy is to think
Ed Balls says he hopes there will never be education cuts under Labour – but I have some rather bad news for him. His department has calculated the effects of Gordon Brown’s plans to suck forward spending pre-election, and helpfully published the results in a pdf file (here). It says that spending per pupil peaks
So now we know the shortlist for Speaker – and it shows Westminster at its most vindictive, corrupt and spiteful. Exactly the same names you’d have expected before any of this expenses furore broke. I simply cannot now see how this race can be taken seriously. As far as I can work out, it has
So it seems Yvette Cooper and Alistair Darling are uneasy about Gordon Brown’s Big Lie and told him so in the last Cabinet. The Sunday Times has a story about how they confronted him over the “Labour investment v 10% Tory cuts” strategy last Tuesday – and the Dear Leader was so unchuffed that he
