Fraser Nelson is a Times columnist and a former editor of The Spectator.
Why is the most solemn day in the Christian calendar called Good Friday? In Sweden and Denmark it’s “long Friday”; in Germany it’s Charfreitag or Sorrowful Friday. That all chimes with what we commemorate at 3pm today – Good Friday does not. I have been unable to find any convincing explanation of this online, so
John McCain is doing Europe tomorrow: Brown for breakfast, Cameron for afters and Sarkozy in Paris in the afternoon. It’s significant that he’s setting aside as much time for Cameron as Brown. In Bournmouth 06, Cameron hailed McCain as the next president of America – not a claim he (or anyone) would have repeated in
As Pete said earlier, even by this government’s low standards, the National Security Strategy is a pitifully weak document. It looks like it was ordered up in 24 hours’ notice: the pages have wide margins, large type and pointless platitudes. “Our assessment remains the same as in the 1998 Strategic Defence Review,” it says –
There are two PMQs: the one seen from galleries in the Commons chamber, and the one on television. The more I go to the former, the more convinced I am the best view is in the latter. Pretty much the whole press gallery jumped to its feet to see what Ed Balls was doing when
From his deckchair in Vietnam, Guido blogs on the latest openings for the revamped (and, perhaps, jinxed) Team Brown – two web experts. He certainly needs them – Labour’s internet operation is indeed dire, and the No10 website is little better (save for the wonderful glimpse it offers of what UK government may look like
A week ago, most people I spoke to in Tory HQ had the happy expectation that Boris Johnson was heading for a glorious defeat. i.e. – that he’d win on the first vote and lose the second. So Boris could be seen as a moral victor but robbed of his true throne by a voting
I thought p8 of the Daily Mail looked familiar. It’s that table of benefits which we ran on Coffee House on Sunday (expanded from my News of the World column). But what’s this? “Tory research” it’s called. On closer inspection, the Tories have used recent welfare figures, and expressed them as a percentage of the
As Brown unveils his National Security Strategy, Fraser Nelson talks to those in the front line against Islamic extremism. MI5 has expanded successfully, but faces in al-Qa’eda an enemy that is organic, elusive and constantly mutating: gangs built on deadly bravado To defeat an enemy, one must first understand him — and this, for years,
Now the Fed has cut US rates by another quarter, what’s next? The City expects UK rates to fall to 4.75% by year-end. Now and again, Gordon Brown likes to boast that he is able to reduce interest rates – unlike the Tories in early 1990s. One of Magician Brown’s favourite tricks is the “false
This is asking for trouble. Ladbrokes has opened a book on the first question David Cameron will ask in PMQs. There will be at least a dozen Tories who will know the answer to this on Wednesday morning, and be sorely tempted to ask their cousin to place a large bet. As you can see
In today’s FT, Alan Greenspan describes the current financial mess as the “most wrenching since the end of the Second World War” (his hindsight being rather better than his foresight). Dismayed though Americans may be, they can console themselves with this fact. The Federal government did not end up having to nationalise Bear Stearns thus lumbering
Rabbi Lionel Blue talks about a “moral long-sightedness” of politics – the ability to see problems thousands of miles away (in Africa) or a century away (climate change) but not the poverty in one’s own doorstep, right now. And little wonder: England is very poor at measuring just how bad things are for its poorest.
It says much about Alistair Darling’s predicament that he used his first Budget to win back a title once used to insult him — being the most boring man in British politics. His office had promised there would be no false scents, no attempts to deceive, no ‘rabbits pulled out of the hat’. The magician
I passed two Evening Standard vendors shouting out the news that Shannon Mathews has been found alive – even though it’s not in the newspaper. One was listening on his radio. I saw the other stop passers-by to tell them. This story probably eclipses all the politcial news of the last year put together. People
Aside from the Chinese Red Army and Indian Post Office, the NHS is the world’s largest employer with 1.3m staff. Government attempts to trim this unwieldy, inefficient behemoth are pathetic. We today learn that the NHS total staff fell by under one percent over the last year. The Tories are up in arms. “The Government
The urgency behind the “family friendly” agenda – which is to be the theme of the Tories’ spring conference in Gateshead – can be traced to an internal opinion poll presentation delivered by Lord Ashcroft a few weeks ago. Mothers were going off David Cameron, apparently – which panicked the Cameroons not a little, as
The Sun’s Budget coverage today spells out the real-life impact of yesterday’s tax increases. Darling’s booze taxes grow with time and by the 2012 Olympics a pint will cost £6.47. Its case studies “Why you benefit if you’re on benefits” has a brilliant example of a £14k-a-year call centre worker who, outrageously, is £266 a
Aside from British budget madness, as Labour and the Tories argue about how much they’d push state spending up, the rest of the world talks about getting spending down. Yesterday, the Swedish press celebrated the fact that their “expenditure reform” (why don’t we hear that phrase here?) is working so well that they have lost
At 7.10am this morning, there was a prime example of why Brown may get away with posing as the champion of welfare reform. Kim Catcheside, the BBC’s social affairs correspondent, was explaining Alistair Darling’s new plans to test everyone on incapacity benefit to see what work they could do (ie, the Tory plan). Catcheside said
Did any Coffee Housers catch what Ed Balls said? David Cameron mentioned the huge tax burden during his budget response and Balls shouted “so what?”. Or that’s Cameron’s version. The Secretary of State for Schools and Children now claims he said “so weak” and was referring to Cameron overall. But look at the spiralling debt, and “so
