Fraser Nelson is a Times columnist and a former editor of The Spectator.
What does Jon Mendelsohn know? Enough, it seems, to keep his job. There was muffled laughter in the house when Brown said a “former bishop of Oxford” would look into all this. Who else? Graham Norton? Cameron did well venting incredulity that Brown would use the old Blair-style inquiry device to kick this into the
I wonder whose turn it will be today to ask the planted PMQs question so Brown can apologise to Labour, rather than the Tories, as he did last week over disc-gate. That was Hoon’s brainwave, but any brownie points he earned will have been destroyed by his disastrous Newsnight interview where he exculpated Jon Mendelson,
Has anyone heard from Jack Dromey? Last time a Labour funding crisis emerged, the party Treasurer was touring TV studios venting pious anger. Now, silence. There are plenty unanswered questions about all this. If Brown and Benn didn’t take this money from Janet Kidd (the secretary in whose name the cash was being donated) then
When a patient’s heart stops beating, medics have about ten minutes to revive it. So it is with the Labour government. Gordon Brown is running out of time to get his defibrillator working. He failed yesterday, and failed again at his monthly press conference. He looks puzzled, bewildered and out of his depth. He is
One of the least explored defects of this government is what Rabbi Lionel Blue calls “moral short-sightedness” – the ability to see problems on another continent, but not on one’s own doorstep. I was reminded of this when Brown announced £106 million of our money to open schools in Nigeria. It’s the latest example of
The government’s response to the Thursday attack by the defence chiefs was to claim that Britain has the second-highest defence spending in the world. It was a new one to me. Does Britain really outspend Russia, with its phenomenal ballistic output? Or China, the communist superpower whose soaring military budget is deeply unnerving the Pentagon?
Tomorrow’s News of the World has a poll which gives the last rites to Brown’s reputation for economic competence. It is truly devastating on many levels. 1. Two months ago Labour had a 12 point lead over the Tories on managing the economy. At the last election it was 30%. Now it is zero: they
There is so much faux theatricality in the House of Commons that it is rare to hear a genuine gasp of incredulity of the sort that coursed around the chamber when Alistair Darling laid out the scale of the latest and greatest disaster on Tuesday. The personal details of 25 million people, including the bank
Alex Salmond is excitedly brandishing his new House of Commons security pass. ‘Look at the expiry date,’ he says. ‘May 2010. That’s the latest date for a general election.’ By then, on his calculations, Scotland will be seven years away from independence. Each MP has to choose a four-digit security code for the card, and
Amidst this Black Tuesday excitement, we’ve missed the real intellectual headway the Tories are making in education – as Iain Martin says in the Telegraph today. The Gove v Balls debate yesterday was brilliant: in these days of faux theatricality it’s a pleasure to see two guys who genuinely hate each other go at it.
So where is the “junior official” who sent all the 25m record on two computer discs? What news of the British civil service’s answer to Nick Leeson? Waiting for his Tory knighthood? In the Bahamas, collecting the £100m from the Hugo Drax of identity fraud? Or in a dungeon underneath No10 waiting for personal treatment
I have seldom seen the chamber so packed. Brown got his apology in early, thanks to a planted Labour question. In the Brown-Cameron clash, Brown scored a good hit, saying Cameron had proposed cuts on HMRC in the Tory 2005 James review – singling out data processing. Labour loved it. Cameron hit back, with today’s
The most important political story on the internet is nothing written by a journalist, but the reaction being posted to on the lost data catastrophe. From the BBC to our own Coffee House, people are pledging to shut down bank accounts and vote Labour out. They seem utterly unmoved by assurances that all is well,
There were genuine gasps of amazement in the chamber when Darling unveiled the scale of this disaster. If you have a child, and receive child benefit, your bank details are right now on the loose. Sort code and account number, together with your address and age of your child – details of 25m people in
Cameron’s proposal for Swedish style school reform may not win him the next election, but if he implements it properly it will win him a second term. His speech today does what I have long hoped for: put a Swedish-style supply side revolution at the heart of Tory policy. The new schools cannot be his
Much as I applaud the Tory education plan in general, my heart sinks when I see stories such as one on the front of The Observer that Cameron wants all kids to read by the age of six. This strikes me as the contradiction running through Tory policy: to regulate, or liberalise? The plan for
Oliver Letwin’s enemies thought they had seen the last of him at Blackpool. His idea of laying out a policy smorgasbord had almost sunk the party, they argued. Yes, there were some good ideas (mainly from Iain Duncan Smith) but having multi-millionaires like Zac Goldsmith proposing a Happy Planet Index and telling the shoppers not
Why did Gordon Brown say “British jobs” for British workers rather than just “jobs?” John Denham wriggled out of this question this morning. I suspect the real answer is that Gordon Brown – a stickler for statistics – is painfully aware of a trend the media has never picked up on: the huge brain drain
Brown lost over immigration at PMQs, but wasn’t thumped which is a result for him. He is desperate to tease out a Tory split on the EU referendum, and may be making progress. I notice that when Brown embarked on his usual misleading economic boast (incapacity benefit numbers are dropping about as fast as Venice
I love it when Alex Salmond sets a deadline for Scottish independence. First was his “free by ’93” slogan, followed by a lame joke about “nationalist heaven in 97”. Then came his prediction that the “union will not live to see its 300th birthday” (ie 2007 – a deadline shared by Sean Connery). Now he’s