Fraser Nelson is a Times columnist and a former editor of The Spectator.
As I type, David Cameron is in the Boothroyd Room, in Portcullis House, addressing Tory MPs who are anxious to hear if his Big Sorry on Friday amounts to a change in direction. True in the Cameroon spirit of open information, I’m being sent some dispatches in real time. Whether it’s interpretation or verbatim quotes isn’t clear: I’ll
So the winning question to David Cameron was Rhoda Klapp’s “Give me five good reasons to vote tory”. It chimes with our winning 2009 resolution for Cameron: “To resolve to produce 5 core reasons to vote Conservative which every British voter is familiar with by the next election”. And his answer? 1) Get rid of
So just how sorry is David Cameron? On Friday he put his hands up to being part of a “cosy consensus” on tax and spending. So I had expected his press conference today to declare he’d torn up his plans to outspend what he inherits from Labour. All bets are off, I expected him to
So what would you ask David Cameron after his apology on Friday? It’s his press conference at 12.15pm today and I’m going along. If any CoffeeHousers have thoughts on a good question, let’s have them…
Might Alistair Darling prove to be a hero of the Labour endgame? When he was first appointed, I argued that he’d be a puppet – “no more a Chancellor than Captain Scarlet was an actor”. I have since heard plenty of stories to the contrary: that he is doing a pretty good job saving taxpayers
The right to keep one’s political affiliation secret is in many eyes a sacred feature of British life. There are households where married couples don’t tell each other how they vote. Those who grew up during the Cold War era remember the years when, in some countries, party membership was a grim prerequisite of a
So Cameron said come out and said sorry. Again. The first stage of his S-Word was that apology on the Andrew Marr Show which was interrupted when the signal from North Kensington collapsed. Today he said…. “Of course I’m sorry that we have got some things wrong, we were right to call time on government debt
As I suspected, opinion amongst CoffeeHousers is divided as to whether RBS asking potential clients for their political affiliation is a big deal. A good chunk of you think this is a scandal. Others don’t. Where, they ask, is the story – it was a simple cock-up. RBS misread EU regulations about extending credit to
Are you a “politically exposed person”? This is what RBS wants to know about its prospective clients, this is the question that led me (when posing as a potential client) to be asked if I was a member of a political party. And when a state-controlled bank like RBS asks people if they are “politically
Some tip-offs are so awful that you almost hope they are untrue. When I was told by Geoff Robbins, a computer consultant, that he had been asked about his political connections before opening an account with the state-controlled Royal Bank of Scotland it sounded fantastical. Having the state owning the UK banking system is bad
In PMQs today, Gordon Brown described the era of nationalised banks as a “wholly new world”. How right he is. The collision between the worlds of politics and banking has created much potential for mischief and I look at some of it in my political column for tomorrow’s magazine including what for me is the
Hmmm. So much for manufacturing-based recovery that is supposed to come as a result of the crash of sterling. Manufacturing output was off 2.9% in January, the eleventh consecutive drop. The fact that we’re a lot cheaper to Americans and Europeans doesn’t seem to help much – partly because any sane foreign client will demand
So what is to become of Patrick Mercer? On the Today programme this morning he was introduced as someone who “has served nine tours in Northern Ireland” – i.e. that rare thing: a politician who knows what he’s talking about. As opposed to Shaun Woodward, whose sole credentials are being a Tory turncoat and being
Terrorism is a propaganda war where words matter as well as bullets, and those who murdered the British soldiers at Massereene Barracks could not complain at the much of the coverage today. The BBC news, and much of the other news, announced simply that the Real IRA had carried out the attacks. Someone who does
Why is it Left wing to allow millions to live on benefits, and let children get each other pregnant? Tom Harris asks this question in an excellent article in the Mail on Sunday today. He’s right to get angry about a situation that means one in five UK children are brought up in workless households,
If there is anything that can bring Gordon Brown a shred of comfort, it is that almost no one in the Labour party is now speculating about his future. There is no shortage of plotting in the bars, tearooms, corridors and urinals of the House of Commons. But what happens to the Prime Minister himself
Whether the Conservatives like it or not, their agenda in government will be the “more for less” agenda. That is, having to cut public spending and find ways to improve services at the same time. This is far from impossible: after all, Labour has proven in the last 12 years that you can virtually double
For those who love email trails, the Public Administration Select Committee has served up a feast – the emails flying around when Brown released premature knife crime figures last December. You can read the full trail here, Email Trail PDF . From my reading, it seems that the decision to use unready statistics came straight
Today’s latest move from the Bank of England is straight from the Dale Winton school of economics: the team (ie, the Monetary Policy Committee) has been given £75 billion to spend in just three months. How will they manage? Time starts… now! Although plenty predicted today’s announcement that Quantitative Easing will now be started few
If you own property, look away now because what follows is ugly reading. Those green shoots Margaret Beckett thought she saw in the property market were illusory, and the 2.0 percent upswing in house prices that Halifax recorded for January has been more than offset with a 2.3 percent fall last month. So far they