Fraser Nelson is a Times columnist and a former editor of The Spectator.
Some of the best journalism never appears in print, which is why it’s a tragedy that documentaries are so tough to get hold of once broadcast. I was being treated to a birthday curry last night and didn’t see Peter Oborne’s superb documentary on Gordon Brown where he had interviewed a hundred people (myself included)
Gordon Brown is to “set out his plans to build 100,000 houses in five eco-towns”. That’ll keep him busy. But it’s the Sunday Times splash and has wrong-footed the Tories who say this initiative was first announced last May. And that’s what I like about Brown. He has so far proved himself a bulwark against
When John Reid was asked if he’d stand for Labour party leader, he would always give the same sort of reply. ‘I have a life outside politics,’ he told me at the last Labour conference. ‘I play the guitar, I play piano. I have a house in France. I could walk away from all this
So what will the new Brown era be like? No more of that nasty spin? Those who attended Anthony Browne’s leaving party on Tuesday evening found out different. As Chief Political Correspondent of The Times, he has been asked to get the Treasury’s response to the newspaper’s extraordinary scoop that Gordon Brown had been warned
As a keen subscriber to Channel Four’s Snowmail service, I immediately opened its email promising “breaking news”. And the news? Tony Blair has “just touched down on Teeside prior to a speech in his constituency” where he’ll announce he’s leaving. As he did in Oct04 and in Sep06. Spare me. We have six weeks until he
Fans of Thatcher’s famous no confidence debate performance shortly before her downfall, will be pleased to note that the same fey eloquence is enlivening Tony Blair’s final few performances. Oliver Letwin’s obscure musings on the way forward for Cameronism were ripe for being lampooned by Blair who was on superb form today; the walls in the
The latest Westminster gossip: he was told by Gordon Brown he wouldn’t be Home Secretary or Foreign Secretary—the only acceptable alternative for him. Perhaps Brown thought his cabinet would be too Scottish, perhaps he wanted to make way for these new young faces and have ”maximum flexibility” (Reid’s words not Brown’s) for his reshuffle. Or
The unravelling of New Labour starts here. John Reid’s decision to quit the cabinet today is loaded with unanswered questions. He has said he’ll back Gordon Brown as leader, but did he decide he couldn’t work with Brown? Did they have a fundamental disagreement about the level of autonomy he’d receive as Home Secretary? Did
For almost two years, Westminster has been abuzz with what many MPs believed to be an explosive secret. The ringleader of the 7 July London bombings, Mohammed Sidique Khan, was not a so-called ‘clean skin’ who came out of the blue. Instead, he had been bugged, photographed and followed during an MI5 investigation into a
When I was a reporter in the Scottish Parliament seven years ago, I wrote a piece on the life of the poor Hansard reporters up there. The MSPs were not the most educated types and the Official Report staff had to un-garble their words every night. They claimed some was Scots. But one phrase made
I went to bed at 5.30am thinking “Well, I’ll wake up and know the result”. It’s now Friday lunchtime, and we’re none the wiser. Who won Scotland? Labour and SNP are on a knife-edge with 100,000 supposedly spoiled ballots. An incredible drama is unfolding, a Scottish version of the “hanging chad” nonsense that bedevilled George
I’m not quite on the BBC election panel – I’ve had better luck. I’m down the boozer: the St Stephens Tavern with Emily Maitlis and a wide array of pundits. They’ll come to us every now and again as we give our considered opinion on how there are no meaningful results expected until about 3am.
Might Labour keep Scotland after all? I’m told Labour HQ in Glasgow is fairly chirpy this evening. The YouGov poll predicting their defeat doesn’t chime with what they’ve picked up from postal voting, nor the gossip from the exit polls. I can well believe this. There is something in the DNA of Scots, which makes
A tiresome trait of local elections is seeing every party declare victory of sorts on election night. At present, it seems only the Scottish National Party will be able to do so tomorrow. I have just had a text message from a nationalist bearing triumphant news: a YouGov poll in the Daily Telegraph tomorrow puts
Fraser Nelson takes to the road and finds voters turning to whichever parties will maximise the mutiny against Blair and Brown. The SNP is now a party of protest, not separatism — but have the Tories done enough to stay on track for power? When locals give chase in a deprived Glasgow housing estate, it
Tony Blair, at least, knows how to keep his silence. When asked about David Miliband’s leadership prospects at his press conference on Tuesday, he repeatedly dodged all questions — knowing that so much as a supportive grunt from him would damage the Environment Secretary’s chances. But as he probably already knew, the issue had been
A fortnight ago, I was invited along to a dinner with John Reid in the private room of a London hotel. It sounded wonderfully conspiratorial, arranged at just a few hours’ notice at a time when speculation about the Labour party leadership was rife. I bounded in to find about a dozen other journalists and
The slide towards extinction in Scotland has persuaded the Tories to draw up a blueprint for separation, says Fraser Nelson. The Scottish Tories would split off — and Cameron’s Conservatives would become the English party For the son of an Aberdonian stockbroker, David Cameron has had an uneasy relationship with Scotland. It is a land
A silencer may have been fitted on the starting gun, but no one in Westminster can doubt that the Gordon Brown leadership campaign is now fully up and running. Ministers are being telephoned and asked when their names can be released as supporters of the Chancellor. Geoff Hoon, still smarting from his demotion to Europe
Even when she slips into a room half an hour late, The Lady can still inspire a standing ovation. ‘Can I welcome Baroness Thatcher who has just joined us,’ said Lord Lamont halfway through the Keith Joseph memorial lecture last Tuesday. He had just started explaining that Sir Keith would have accepted today’s Conservative slogan