Fraser Nelson is a Times columnist and a former editor of The Spectator.
My first job in journalism was with the Glasgow Herald, which then had a bar built in to the complex. I was taken under the wing of the legendary James Freeman, who taught me the ways of the jungle. ‘You see that journalists always drink in groups of three?’ he told me in the bar
David Cameron has just been interviewed by Sarah Montague on Radio Four, who rather put him through his paces. She teased out an interesting position he is adopting to the growing concern about his Help to Buy mortgage subsidies. He defends himself by saying he will liberate those ‘trapped’ in rented accommodation and casts his
The chief executive of The Guardian has delivered a rather grim verdict about the newspaper’s future (or lack thereof). ‘At the moment, I believe we could not survive in the U.K,’ says Andrew Miller, blaming the ‘oversupply’ of newspapers and the omnipresence of the BBC. He has been speaking to the New Yorker magazine which
You have to hand it to George Osborne: he’s great at turning massive setbacks to his advantage. He pledged to get rid of the deficit over one parliament, now he’s boldly saying he’ll do it over two. Be had said he’d sort out the economy over five years (after all, Britain won a world war
Here’s what jumped out at me from David Cameron’s interview with Andrew Marr in Manchester this morning: Tax cuts: the Tory weapon ‘As this economy has started to recover, it’s very difficult for people to make ends meet. Their wages are relatively fixed, and the prices are going up. That’s why cutting people’s taxes is
Come and have a look – cheap, cheap debt! Very, very good – cheap, cheap debt! The £1 fish singer may have been deported, but his spirit lives on in George Osborne’s launch announcement today. The Tory response to Ed Miliband’s cost-of-living pledge seems to be more adventures into sub-prime. The Chancellor will press ahead
For political junkies, autumn is bringing a fix of three big books. Damian McBride’s expose of Gordon Brown has come out, Matthew d’Ancona’s inside story of the Cameron government will be serialised tomorrow. But I’ve just finished the other biggie: Iain Martin lifting the lid on RBS. Finally, Britain has an answer to Andrew Ross
A banker of my acquaintance went to Switzerland skiing this winter. A luxury he normally could not afford, but he’d just remortgaged thanks to George Osborne’s Funding For Lending scheme and saved a packet. To his amazement, he was being bailed out by the Chancellor – he didn’t need the money but thought he’d take
When the Damian McBride scandal blew up, Ed Balls was quick to distance himself from his former colleague saying he spoke to ‘Mr McBride’ once or twice and had dealings with him when they worked in Treasury but had not had much contact since. I remember Ben Brogan (then at the Mail) blogging: ‘Liar, liar,
In his Guardian column tomorrow, Jonathan Freedland writes that Ed Miliband reckons he’ll “get a kicking from the Daily Telegraph” for his lurch to the left, but his ‘gamble’ is that he’ll survive it. The Times and the Daily Mail have not given his remarkable speech much of a better reception (above). All three newspapers can
‘Red Ed is back,’ said the Daily Mirror’s Kevin Mcguire, and it’s a fair summary of today’s speech. He has pledged to use state power to force the hand of property companies: “use it or lose it” he said, reviving the idea of compulsory purchases. His new flagship policy is imposing a 20-month price freeze
Why does the right like Labour’s Jon Cruddas so much? Because he’s actually a conservative. He’s just admitted as much in a fringe meeting, hosted by my colleagues at the Centre for Social Justice. He was talking about his own politics: conservative, he said. But in a Labour way. ‘I don’t go in for the
I will admit to a grudging admiration for Ed Balls. He’s wrong about most things, dangerously so. But his speeches are always well-considered, full of substance and usually part of a strategy that he keeps up for months if not years. For that reason, his speeches are always worth reading. This was a good speech,
As Ed Balls knows, people tend only to remember one thing about a speech. A word if you’re lucky, a sentence if you’re really lucky. Or an image. Perhaps he was relyijg on HS2 to grab the headlines because the image he conjured up for us today was David Cameron getting changed in the beach
What’s Ed Miliband about? In a word: socialism. You can think this a good or a bad thing, but there ought to be no doubt about where he stands. At a Q&A in the Labour conference last night, he was challenged by an activist: When will you bring back socialism?’ ‘That’s what we are doing, sir’
The Scottish speech is normally a neglected part of the Labour Party conference but has more potency now that there’s less than a year to go to the referendum. Johann Lamont, leader of Scottish Labour, is an important actor in the battle to save the union. The Tory vote in Scotland has been reduced to staff members and blood
‘Labour plans have a £27 billion black hole,’ says the Sunday Times, quoting analysis from George Osborne’s Treasury. If true, that’s the first piece of good economic news we’ll have heard from Labour. Osborne’s black holes have been way, way bigger – well over £100 billion so far. In his excellent new book about journalese,
Three years ago, just two lonely journalists turned up to the UKIP annual conference. This year, they have accredited 150 of them. Now Britain’s third-largest party (it has led the LibDems in the polls since March) Nigel Farage positions himself as an insurgent whose message is so incendiary that the mainstream would not dare to
‘Drug use; spousal abuse; secret alcoholism; extra-marital affairs. I estimate I did nothing with 95 per cent of the stories I was told. But, yes, some of them ended up on the front pages of Sunday newspapers.’ And with this starts the serialisation of what will be perhaps the most explosive book about British politics for
In a small cupboard at the end of my office sits a bottle of 1995 Lagavulin, distilled in a Pedro Ximénez sherry cask. Just looking at it from my desk gives me immense pleasure. I can open it and smell the cork if I need inspiration. And sometimes, after The Spectator is put to bed, I
