Fraser Nelson is a Times columnist and a former editor of The Spectator.
When Gordon Brown was defending his decision to scrap the 10p tax rate in April 2008, he spoke as if he was avenging a great moral wrong. “I think I should tell the House that 85 per cent of the benefits of the 10p rate go to higher-rate and basic-rate taxpayers, and that 11 million
It goes from tragedy to farce. Madame Tussauds has decided against having a Gordon Brown waxwork amongst its world leaders – he dithered over whether to sit for its sculptors and they got fed up waiting for a reply. “Since then we have had no response and, reflecting the climate after the Government’s performance in the
Cameron has three times avoided in his press conference answering what a Conservative government would do to help those people stung by the 10p tax. (No, A cock hasn’t crowed). A tough issue for him, and I’ll see if I can do any better as I travel with him on the train to Crewe. He
I am interviewing the victorious David Cameron later on today, after his monthly press conference. Any questions Coffee Housers would like to put to him?
Ladbrokes has just updated its odds for the next Labour leader. Which of the below names would have the ability to unite Labour against Brown, successfully trigger a leadership challenge, secure union support to depose him, and then volunteer to lead the party into what will probably be an election defeat? And if you were
“They say that Gladstone was at the Treasury from 1860 to 1930. I intend to be Minister of Labour from 1940 to 1990”- Ernest Bevin The five scariest words you will read in the press today are in The Sun, where Trevor Kavanagh says “I give him six months”. Brown, like Bevin, will have factored
Brown’s breathtakingly bad performance on Marr risks overlooking Liam Fox’s brilliant one. As Andrew Porter has said, word perfect. We see too little of Fox for my liking. Like David Davis, he has an instinctive grasp of low-tax economics and has a wonderful emperor’s-got-no-clothes contempt for Brown’s economic record. “Labour are still caught in this
A friend of mine, a BBC producer, sends this text message: “I’m watching the PM ‘relaunch’ from behind the sofa. The slow public death of Mr Brown continues. Painful to watch.” Difficult to disagree too much. My thoughts:- 1) “It’s been a bad night” he started – woops! Wrong soundbite. That one was for use
I would like to call on the collective wisdom of CoffeeHousers. I have read everywhere that Thursday was Labour’s worst result for 40 years, whereas it looks to me as if it is the worst since World War One. Here’s why. As far as I can determine, the source for this “40 years” was Tony
Over lunch about a year ago, I tried to tease out the intentions of someone tipped as a possible successor to Gordon Brown. He was feigning optimism and loyalty to the anointed leader-in-waiting, so I advanced some hypothetical scenarios involving various MPs being run over by buses. So would he maybe… ‘Me? God, no,’ he
The conventional wisdom is to regard Mayor Boris as a loose cannon and, ergo, a liability to Cameron. But he may help oust Brown by another skill that has only become apparent in recent weeks: he drives the left mad. By mad, I mean he drives them to inverted snobbery and making personal and ludicrous
“Boris is the Mayor” proclaims the Evening Standard. News to the rest of us, anxiously waiting. The poor souls must have held back the edition for a 5pm result, and decided to take a punt. “After a nail biting count, Mr Johnson was so far ahead on first preference votes he could not be caught,
Dire rumours flying about the Mayoral count, hopefully all untrue. The worst is that we may not have a winner by midnight. Adam Boulton at Sky News confident of getting one tonight – but perhaps not until 10.30pm. One Tory Shadow Cabinet member says he has been told there’s 1% in it, so they will
“So fair and foul a day I have not seen” – Macbeth Act 1, Scene 3 Can this beautiful May afternoon get any worse for McBrown? Em, yes. Stuart Wheeler has been granted permission to hold a High Court hearing over the Government’s refusal to hold a referendum on the renamed EU Constitution. Even Open
I’ve just done BBC World Service with Martin Bright, my counterpart at the New Statesman. We’re pitched against each other quite a lot – the theory being that I’m a right-winger, he’s a left-winger and we’ll go at each other. Problem is, we agree on most things – and I certainly won’t demur from his
So, when was the last year Labour did so badly? “Since records began in 1973” say the Tories but surely they can do better than that. Michael Portillo, whom I was sitting beside for an hour as we waited to be called by the BBC, pointed out that there may not be equivalent national share
If you want to know why blogs have the edge over newspapers on election night, take a look at tomorrow’s newspapers. I’ve just finished reviewing them on Sky News alongside Roger Alton, the Spectator’s sports columnist (other job: editor-in-waiting of The Independent). Knowing nothing, what can the papers do? Only The Sun predicts a big
I have just spoken to a senior Labour staffer (not Douglas Alexander!) who tells me they are seeing the “mirror image” of what I am hearing from the Tories. That is to say: high turnout in the Labour supporting inner city areas, much better than they thought. There is an obvious risk that Labour only looks
Anyone who follows ConservativeHome.com know it doesn’t take fliers. And it has just called the election for Boris. You may think: wishful thinking from those Tories. But no website is better plugged in to what’s happening out there; what the activists and tellers are saying. My sources report massive turnout in strong Tory areas like Chingford.
The Guardian’s G2 today informs us that Boris “despises gays, ” “despises provincials” and “despises Africans.” What is more, “He despises those of us who hold such judgments to be bigoted and inhuman” according to Zoe Williams. It has quotes from various “Londoners” saying things like “I think he’s racist”. But my favourite quote is