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James Forsyth

A fractured and crowded field

The remarkable thing about the Tory leadership election is how long it has been coming. When Theresa May blew the party’s majority in the 2017 general election, few imagined that it would be two years before she quit as leader. What kept her in place was not a lack of Tory ruthlessness but a failure

How I very nearly became the victim of an online scam

Please don’t suppose I’m unaware I’ve been an idiot. I recount what happened to me last week without expecting your sympathy or understanding, and this account carries only the very slightest plea in mitigation: the suggestion that it could happen to you too, even if you don’t think you’d ever be so stupid. Because I

Don’t use up all your rhetoric at once

Saturday night, a guest commentator on Sky News sputtered that Donald Trump has ‘normalised white supremacy’. Once the American President has floated off to the horizon after his three-day visit to the UK as an inflatable media punching bag, we will doubtless have been subjected to much further denunciation of this diabolical, fiendish, authoritarian, hate-filled,

How to save the Tory party

How do you feel about the standard of political debate in this country? I ask this question at the very moment two blimps are flying over London. The first attempts to depict President Donald Trump as a giant baby in a nappy and is the property of people who do not like Donald Trump; the

The Spectator's Notes

The Spectator’s Notes | 6 June 2019

My father Richard, who died last month aged 88, was a profoundly impractical man. He could not drive a car, swim, whistle, use a mobile phone or computer, or play any ball game apart from croquet. One of his most common remarks was (he could not pronounce his ths), ‘Vis wretched fing [a door handle,

Any other business

In favour of nationalisation? Take a look at Network Rail

We don’t hear enough about Network Rail these days. By that I mean that the entity recently described by the Sunday Times as ‘synonymous with incompetence and delays’ doesn’t receive anything like the abuse it deserves for failing to provide the infrastructure essential for a 21st-century railway. I refer you to the Crossrail project, in