Fraser Nelson is a Times columnist and a former editor of The Spectator.
David Cameron has not sought to seek personal or political capital from the Olympics, for which he deserves much credit. It doesn’t take much to imagine how Gordon Brown would have behaved had he been in power. But this is politics, Cameron is under pressure to establish an “Olympic Legacy” so he will today announce
When I won the first Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize, it was gratifying for me on every level. It helped me find a market for my work in the national press, and gave me the confidence to regard myself as a full-time writer. – Hilary Mantel. The Shiva Naipaul prize is awarded to the writer best
Nick Clegg’s decision to scupper boundary reviews in retaliation for the failure of his Lords reform programme is the very opposite of ‘mature’ government. It is the politics of the sand pit: you have annoyed me, so I’m going to kick your sandcastle down. It’s his way of putting a horse’s head in Cameron’s bed,
I’m off for my annual digital detox: no ConservativeHome, no PoliticsHome, just my wife’s family home in Stockholm and swapping my Blackberry for a primitive mobile with a battery that lasts a week. But before I sign off completely, I’d like to abuse my position to ask CoffeeHousers for book recommendations. I’ve done this for
Is the City of London worth defending? Not many in the government seem to think so. Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, calls it a ‘cesspit’. George Osborne blames the financial sector for causing the crisis – the Barclays Libor scandal, to him, was not an isolated incident but indicative of the whole rotten system, ‘the
Nick Cohen’s Spectator cover story on Olympic censorship has been a smash hit, and is still being tweeted all over the world. It was followed up this morning by BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on its 8.10am slot, and CoffeeHousers who missed it can listen again here. Freddy Gray, assistant editor of The Spectator, is quoted at the beginning on
James Forsyth’s Mail on Sunday column is my first read every Sunday, and it’s choc full of details as ever. Here is his account of the Liberal Democrat reaction to last week’s House of Lords defeat: On Thursday morning, Nick Clegg and David Cameron agreed a new phase of the Coalition after what one
Milton Friedman would have been 100 later this month, and there is likely to be much commemoration – much of it nostalgia for an era where the right had a clear idea about how to get out of the mess the left had left. I always believed that Friedman’s ability to articulate – his gift
Sometimes fiction can be more accurate than published facts. Ten years ago a film, Dirty Pretty Things, told about the plight of illegal immigrants into Britain and the least-explored scandals of all: the black market trade in human organs. It was an aspect of Britain’s secret country, the black market occupied by a million-plus souls
At 7am this morning, The Spectator’s managing director emailed me to say the new magazine is on sale at WH Smiths at Victoria station – a good sign, he said. But why shouldn’t it be? Because this week, we’re running a cover story by Nick Cohen lambasting the thuggish Olympic censors, the people who are
David Cameron said in Prime Minister’s Questions today that there have been 800,000 more private sector jobs under his government. This is almost true, and — I thought — worthy of elaboration. Government cannot, of course, ‘create’ jobs — all it can do is move jobs from the private to the public sector. Every penny
The Guardian has published a piece on school reform which perfectly expresses the attitude which has condemned children of lower-income parents to dismal education for years. The introduction of the story goes as follows: There are around 10,600 empty school places in Suffolk. Or, to put it another way, if 10 average-sized secondary schools
The Lib Dem dove has been shot by a well-aimed Tory arrow tonight, and you can bet that more than a few of Nick Clegg’s allies will feel deeply betrayed. The Lib Dems walked on the coals of the tuition fee rises, and for what? The Tory leadership cannot really claim to be giving its
School and welfare reform are the signature missions of David Cameron’s government – but is welfare going wrong? Labour is crowing that today’s figures from the Work and Pensions department on welfare-to-work show it’s a failure. I’ve just come back from a DWP briefing with Chris Grayling, the minister responsible, and thought Coffee Housers would
Is parliament good for anything? This is, in effect, the question behind the coming Libor investigation. Ed Miliband’s assumption that to get any questions answered you need a judge-led inquiry fits a trend, and one that Rod Liddle examines in this week’s magazine. For my part, I’m uneasy about the deification of the judiciary and
I’d like to offer my own solution to the coalition problem that James referred to earlier. First, my theory of what went wrong. At first, the coalition worked well and was radical. Nick Clegg felt that he’d build up his party’s support over time, by proving it could work well in government. This didn’t work,
So what did George Osborne tell The Spectator? The words he used to James Forsyth became the centre of a Question Time bust up last night and one that had to be broken up by a Sex Pistol. Let’s start with Ed Balls’ version. He told the Commons that Osborne impugned his integrity by
Bob Diamond had thought it safe to take a bonus this year. His record, he thought, spoke for itself: Barclays had steered its way through the financial crisis without taking a penny of government subsidy. In 2012, it was making profit, paying tax, providing mortgages and being a model corporate citizen. His zombie rivals, RBS and
The Glasgow-based writer Gerry Hassan took part in our Scottish independence debate on Tuesday, and then made the mistake of getting the train back to Glasgow. It took 15 hours. No one could help a landslip in Cumbria, but then one of the engines caught fire. His story, below (recorded by the BBC), is perhaps
Many Spectator subscribers, picking up today’s newspapers, will be a bit puzzled. Is it news that David Cameron has come round to the idea of an EU referendum? Haven’t they read that somewhere before? This sensation is called Déjà Lu, and it I’m afraid afflicts all Spectator subscribers. Cameron’s decision to change his position on