Fraser Nelson is a Times columnist and a former editor of The Spectator.
Ed Miliband has adopted a rather simple strategy: do nothing, and wait for your opponents to screw up. It’s lazy, but undoubtedly effective. The Tories are playing along perfectly. The last week has given plenty ammunition for his new theme — which he repeated during his union Sponsored Walk yesterday — ‘they think they are
Andrew Mitchell’s resignation does not leave David Cameron looking weak, as Labour is claiming tonight. The weekend press will have plenty fun with all this. But in the longer run, it’s the best option – and for everyone involved. The Prime Minister had an unattractive choice: he could cut his Chief Whip adrift, and give
Coffee House was this morning named Best Online Comment Site at the Editorial Intelligence awards. We fought off stiff competition from three excellent rivals: the Guardian’s Comment is Free site, the New Statesman’s ever-improving blog and the Sunday Times’s own unmissable site. Our Coffee House editor Isabel Hardman collected the gong, but there was no speech. Which is just as well
Obama edged this one, but I’d say it was a pretty low quality debate. The president’s performance would have done nothing to reassure voters who wanted to know more about what he’d do with four more years. He was eloquent but, at times, vacuous. Romney, for his part, started to ask questions of Obama directly.
I used to be a barman in a pub in Rosyth, where David Cameron is visiting today, and it’s hardly a hotbed of separatism. Its dockyard is not just a reminder of the many defence jobs the Union brings, but of what happens when the work shrinks and the jobs go. Many of the locals
When the unionists were looking for a hero to fight Alex Salmond, no one really thought of grey old Alistair Darling. He was the human fire extinguisher, sent into blazing departments to make them so boring that no smoke – or anything else – ever emerged. But now, he is taking a torch to Salmond’s
One of the highlights of the Paul Ryan vs Joe Biden debate last week was Ryan attempting to explain that you can lower tax rates and increase tax revenues. “Not mathematically possible,” snapped back Biden. “Never been done before.” It has, replied Ryan. “Jack Kennedy lowered tax rates and increased growth.” An incredulous Biden said:
Britain’s national debt is rising faster than any of the basket-case Eurozone countries that George Osborne is so fond of disparaging but here’s the thing: only 16pc of voters realise that debt is going up. Why? Are they all thick? Or could it be that our political class is systematically misleading them? I’m inclined towards
The great paradox of British politics is that the left moan about inequality, but it’s the right who will remedy it. Ed Miliband is proposing the restoration of the old order, where the poor get the worst schools and the rich get the best (and the opportunities that flow from it). Labour plans to tax
This was one of David Cameron’s optimism speeches, a recession-era variant of his ‘let sunshine win the day’. It was pretty short of announcements, which is understandable given the lack of any good news. Instead he focused on essential optimism of the Conservative message: that this is a party which places faith in people, not
The notion of “the mood” of the Tory party conference is harder to judge nowadays, when only one in four people here are actually Tory activists. But those I do speak to are quite upbeat. They shouldn’t be, really: the polls are pretty grim, the IMF has today underlined the depressing economic situation. But this has
I’m interviewing Iain Duncan Smith today for a fringe event at the Conservative Party Conference, hosted by the Centre for Social Justice. I will be able to grill him for an hour. It’s been quite a week for him, with this rapprochement with George Osborne and continued questions over the viability of his Universal Credit.
The IMF’s growth downgrades will make tomorrow’s newspaper headlines but the more striking point is its decision to massively rewrite British economic history. As Citi’s Michael Saunders notes (PDF), the IMF now believes that UK economy was massively overheating in the boom. What we had thought was normal growth was, in fact, crazy exuberance. Britain’s economy
Today’s downgrades from the IMF have overshadowed the Tory conference and pose an awkward question: if George Osborne’s policies were working, wouldn’t they be working by now? Is it time for a Plan B? It’s the biggest issue in British politics right now and we at The Spectator are bringing together two former Chancellors to
You could tell this was the Boris Johnson show because people were smiling when they queued, smiling as they listened and smiling as they left. The mood in the conference hall had been completely transformed: it was as if this were comedy night, and we were waiting for the Prince of Political Standup. He was
BBC Radio Five is broadcast on 909 kHz, but whatever wavelength the Conservative Party is using was not being received by the 200 average voters assembled by Victoria Derbyshire’s meet-the-public programme now held in every party conference. It’s normally the closest that ordinary voters get to the party conferences, inviting frontbenchers to take questions from
Speaking to John Pieenar on Five Live, Boris Johnson said he wished to deal with the leadership speculation, shoot it down with “six inch guns”. He did so by repeatedly refusing to say that David Cameron is doing a better job than he would have done. He was behind Cameron “from the very beginning,” he
Ed Miliband is, for all his faults, fairly honest – as politicians go. So why did he tell an outright lie in his conference speech? Andrew Neil has just confronted Douglas Alexander on a claim that Miliband made last week. Here’s what was in the speech:- Next April, David Cameron will be writing a cheque
Today’s Guardian magazine runs a Michael Gove profile, colouring him blue on the cover as if to alert readers to the threat he poses. “Smoother than Cameron,” it warns. “Funnier than Boris. More right-wing than both. Are you looking at the next leader of the Tory Party?” There is nothing unusual about leadership speculation following a
Things have come to a pretty pass when the Labour Party is launching a campaign with a deficit clock to expose George Osborne’s shortcomings. But they are about to do today, I understand, highlighting how much extra the government is borrowing over the four days of the Tory conference compared to last year: £277 million,
