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James Forsyth

How high a price will Truss pay?

This year’s Conservative party conference was supposed to be a moment of celebration for the new Tory leader. Instead there is a sense of mounting alarm. Liz Truss’s radicalism has been met with something approaching panic by both the markets and the public. The Bank of England has had to intervene in the gilts market

Why is the right not making the moral case for lower taxes?

There was an article recently in the increasingly woke but still useful New Scientist which attempted to gauge the degree to which luck was responsible for who we are and, hence, an individual’s life circumstances. I think it came in third place after genes and the environment – which are also both down to luck,

I’m in trouble with the police

There is almost nothing I like more than a running battle. As my friend Julie Burchill also says, when a really good row comes along it gives you this warm, cosy feeling inside. So it was not with disappointment that I received a noteworthy response to my column of last week. For those who were

Maybe Nanny does know best

Not least among the shivers down my spine as I listen to Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng pump up the rhetoric on their economic revolution is the evocation of myself – myself when young. Like Ms Truss, I too joined the Liberal party as an Oxbridge fresher. I too believed in the power of personal

Shame should not be heritable

Vice-chancellor Stephen Toope claims it was ‘inevitable’ that a university ‘as long-established as Cambridge’ would have links to slavery. Now that faculties gorge on racial guilt as Cambridge dons once famously feasted on roasted swans, what was really inevitable is that a body christened ‘The Advisory Group on the Legacies of Enslavement’ would find links

The Spectator's Notes

The genius of Hilary Mantel

Yes, but why did the IMF put out its Tuesday night statement? Even if all its criticisms of the government’s new economic policy were correct, why the rush? The IMF’s action is insulting to a G7 country and premature because its thoughts were inevitably composed without full knowledge. It is best seen as part of

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