Fraser Nelson is a Times columnist and a former editor of The Spectator.
Most Conservatives I have spoken to in the last couple of hours are optimistic, hoping the prospect of RedEd in power has inspired a higher turnout amongst Tory voters. The Tories could still win, the polls could be as wrong as they were in 1992. But my concern is about the campaign. I hate to say
A modernising, young Prime Minister advocates free schools, cuts taxes and oversees a job creation miracle – could voters really kick him out? It happened in Sweden six months ago when Fredrik Reinfeldt lost the general election, even though his successor failed to win a majority. Earlier this year, I caught up with Reinfeldt to
It’s hard not to feel a bit sorry for Nick Clegg. He’s a decent man who took a tough decision to put his party into coalition with the Conservatives, and lost half of his support as a result. Tomorrow, his party will be hammered. His great miscalculation was imagining that in England the Lib Dems would
Who is to blame for Ed Miliband getting the job projections so embarrassingly wrong? Famously, he used to go about advocating his ratio of doom: that there would be one private sector job lost for every state sector job shed by the coalition. Given that George Osborne intended to shed half a million government jobs, Miliband’s maths predicted a million
The Guardian’s superb live blog was even better than usual this morning when it covered Twitter’s reaction to the Ed Miliband interview: eight tweets, of which five came from Spectator staff. That’s what I call balance: opinion from the full spectrum of opinion in 22 Old Queen St. We were challenging Miliband’s claim when he said the debt was
On the radio this morning, Ed Miliband spoke as if he could get a Queen’s Speech passed without speaking to the SNP. This struck some as implausible, but it sounds right to me. Here’s the transcript:- Q: Well let’s just be absolutely clear… neither you nor any of your colleagues will have any conversations with anybody
Ed Miliband’s worst moment in the Question Time debate came when he refused to accept that Labour had spent too much before the crash. The audience reacted with fury: how could he be trusted if he has yet to work out what he did wrong? This is toxic for him because his denial is completely
Our last five Spectator debates have sold out, so tomorrow night we’re holding a subscriber-only election briefing. James Forsyth and I will go through the campaign as it looks so far, discuss the latest polling (and how to interpret it), what the campaign chiefs are thinking – and then talk about what lies ahead. Normally, the events are about £40,
[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/theelectionwhereeverybodyloses/media.mp3″ title=”Tim Montgomerie and Ryan Bourne discuss Boris’ vision for conservatism” startat=758] Listen [/audioplayer]Boris Johnson strides into the Uxbridge Conservative Club, asks after the barmaid’s health and sits down beneath a portrait of Margaret Thatcher. Churchill and Harold Macmillan are on the other walls. The room comes from the days when the Conservatives were
If there is any link between economic optimism and politics than David Cameron should easily win the general election next week. Today’s figures show consumer confidence around 30-year highs. The number who think now’s a good time to by a house (above) is surging. Not since 1987 have we had so many saying that the UK’s
I hate to admit it, but Ed Miliband has a point about the need for raising the stamp duty threshold to £300,000 for first-time buyers. (The FT has the story tomorrow, and Sky News has the £300k detail). The tax was invented to give the government a slice of the more expensive housing transactions – the
The Sunday Times Rich List is out today – and it says a lot about Britain. Mainly: what type of country are we? One that reads that supplement with admiration, or with outrage? I’d argue that the former, but this runs contrary to the bovine populism being encouraged by Labour. Ed Miliband wants to raise
Our last five Spectator debates have sold out, so we’re adding a new one at short notice – only for our subscribers. It’s an election briefing on Friday, 1 May where James Forsyth and I will go through the campaign as it looks so far, discuss the latest polling (and how to interpret it), what the campaign chiefs are
The economic good news continues. Until now, the Achilles’ heel of the recovery was weak tax revenue – in part deliberate, as Osborne’s tax cuts meant the thousands moving into work got to keep more of their money. But figures out today (pdf) show that the tax haul was up 5.3 per cent in the
David Cameron is sitting underneath a sign that reads QUIET CARRIAGE, speaking loudly enough to be heard in the next carriage. He knows that even his closest allies are worried he may lose the election if he doesn’t show more passion, so he has been trying to compensate in recent days. He chops the air
In this week’s Spectator, out tomorrow, James Forsyth and Fraser Nelson have interviewed the Prime Minister David Cameron. He discusses why even his closest colleagues think he needs to show more passion and warns that Nicola Sturgeon wants the next government to be a ‘car crash’. Here is an extended preview… David Cameron is sitting underneath a sign
Nicola Sturgeon met my Auntie Patsy over the weekend, then was kind enough to tweet a picture of their encounter (below). Seeing her sandwiched between the two people most likely to break up the union was odd, but so was discovering that many members of my extended family are now voting SNP. Aunt Patsy is, I’m
The jobs miracle continues – two million new jobs have now been created since David Cameron took over. The Tories are rightly boasting about all of this today, even if they’re keeping quiet about the fact that half of those new jobs have gone to foreign-born workers. Over the last five years, Cameron has overseen more
A spectre is haunting Europe — and knocking on the door of Downing Street. It has installed a president in France and a mayor in New York. It is causing mayhem in Spain and Greece and insurgency in Scotland and it may yet halt Hillary Clinton’s march to the White House. This idea — left-wing
“I’ve got it too,” said David Cameron, whipping out the ‘contract with Britain’ he published five years ago. His team seems have prepared him for the format of Evan Davis’s BBC interviews: confront the subject with discomfiting material, probe a bit and see what happens. But he was less prepared for being challenged from the right. Davis asked
