Fraser Nelson is a Times columnist and a former editor of The Spectator.
When ministers come up with a bright idea to promote home ownership, it’s usually time to worry. David Cameron has written for the Mail on Sunday today and it says that, on Thursday, he will detail yet more policies to help the housebuilding industry. CoffeeHousers will be familiar with the argument: England needs 230,000 extra
In Tampa, the Republican conference has heard a line of powerful speakers talk about government debt in compelling and urgent way. There’s a contingent of eight Tories out there, led by party chairman Sayeeda Warsi, but I doubt they’ll be taking many notes. The finely-honed attack lines that the Republicans are coming out are more
The Republican base is mad as hell with Barack Obama; Mitt Romney is just disappointed. ‘You know there’s something wrong with the kind of job he’s done as president when the best feeling you had was the day you voted for him.” he said in his acceptance speech last night. “I wish President Obama had
Marco Rubio, who was almost picked as Mitt Romney’s running mate, demonstrated an important part of the Republican strategy last night: to steer clear of any personal attacks of Barack Obama and actually praise the president as a man. In his speech introducing Romney, the Florida senator had this to say:- “Our problem with President
The Olympics and Paralympics have been a superb spectacle this summer, but will they help the economy? No one in the Treasury thinks so – if anything, they fear the games will hurt the figures and pretty soon we’ll be hearing about the ‘Olympic Effect’ damaging Q3 growth figures. George Osborne is already being mocked
‘I am the granddaughter of a Welsh coalminer,’ said Ann Romney, as she introduced herself to America last night, auditioning for the job of First Lady. She did pretty well, and if she were the actual candidate then the Republicans would be home and dry. Whatever her roots, she is now the millionaire owner of an
The Republican National Convention is properly underway today*, where Mitt Romney will try to introduce himself to an America that still doesn’t really know him. The race is close: Romney leads 47-46 in a Gallup poll. Both sides have been spewing out attack ads, which seem to be working: not for 20 years have both
‘If we don’t like modern Britain, then it is very unlikely that modern Britain will like us’ says Damian Green, in a piece for the Daily Telegraph today. I’m not sure if this is a piece of pre-reshuffle positioning or a cri de coeur, but his analysis is about ten years out of date. Green is
The idea of closing the House of Commons for five years will, I suspect, be popular with those who see in this a chance to move the MPs to a lifeless, European style semi-circular chamber that supposedly encourages them to co-operate. The current Commons chamber is divided by the length of two swords, a deliberately
Remember when we used to laugh at Germany’s economy? Gordon Brown loved to contrast its sclerotic labour market with booming Britain. That was in the boom years. As Warren Buffet said, when the tide goes out you can see who is swimming naked – and today Britain looks as naked as a prince on a
It’s official: Quantitative Easing has marked the biggest transfer of wealth to the rich of any government policy in recent documented history. The Bank of England released an analysis today, which was rejected as being an underestimate by the former government pensions adviser Ros Altman. But it was shocking enough, and the strongest point was made
Has anyone seen George Osborne’s £3 billion? The Chancellor seems to have lost it. His government had expected to net £2.5 billion more than it spent last month, as July is normally a good month for tax receipts. Instead the figure has come in at a £600 million deficit. This is a major shock to
The cover story of last week’s Spectator was about the political impact of rising crop prices: John R. Bradley, who alone predicted the Egyptian revolution, explained how the same phenomenon is happening again. His piece speaks best for itself but today HSBC has released some research making the same point. I thought Coffee Housers may
The problem with granting independence to schools is that you never know what they’ll do with it. Quite a few of them want to use pre-existing freedoms to sell their school sports ground which happened all the time under Labour and was (like forest disposals) not much remarked upon. But now, post-Olympics, the issue of
Before the last election, I had dinner with a Labour minister who told me her number one fear about the Tories getting in would be seeing David Cameron lap up the Olympic limelight. The Olympics, she feared, would hugely benefit whoever happened to be in power – and that was, she feared, going to be
With apologies to his Royal Highness, the most popular boy’s name isn’t Harry – in spite of what you will have read in the papers this week. It’s Mohammed, under various spellings. The Guardian hasn’t even worked this out, in spite of its pretty data table. Table 6 on the ONS results shows: some 8,018 baby Mohammeds
What do you say to an Arts graduate? ‘Big Mac and fries, please!’ I used to laugh at that joke until I was served a Junior Whopper by one of my fellow arts graduates in Edinburgh and ever since then I’ve been suspicious of the story I was sold at school: that going to university takes
The Spectator’s sales figures are out today, with digital sales included for the first time. I’m pleased to report that, in a pretty murderous market, our sales are still rising — and, thanks to our new digital readers, rising at the fastest rate in ten years. The red line shows our print sales. It’s not
What a superb closing Olympic ceremony. Normally, government chokes the life out of any arts project it takes on and I’d expected the Olympic Stadium ceremonies to be the Millennium Dome Live. How wrong I was. The gathering of the thousands of athletes reprised the theme of the opening ceremony: that this is about people,
When the contestants were lining up for last night’s sensational 5,000 metre race, both of the American contestants waited until the cameras were on them, then crossed themselves and held their hands in prayer. It’s quite some sight to secular Brits, where religious language (even ‘God bless’) and mannerisms have dropped out of our national