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James Forsyth

Why the next election will be harder for the Tories

Ever since Boris Johnson’s disastrous decision to try to stay the standards committee’s guilty verdict against Owen Paterson, things have started going wrong for Downing Street. The roots of the government’s problem can be traced back to a speech, though. Not Johnson’s rambling address to the CBI earlier this week, but his speech at Tory

The American identity crisis

There was no reason for the world ever to hear the name Kyle Rittenhouse. Except that in the summer of 2020 the USA was staring over a precipice. The Covid lockdowns effectively ended after the killing of George Floyd by a Minnesotan policeman. Suddenly mass gatherings in the name of BLM were a public-health duty

Has Covid turned us into a nation of hermits?

If there’s one thing I misjudged completely, it’s how creepy and long-lasting the effects of lockdown on all of us would be. I’m not in this case talking about the catastrophic medical cost: the heart attacks and strokes, the missed diagnoses. If we’d let Covid rip, if we hadn’t locked down, I’m not sure there’d

The Spectator's Notes

Peppa Pig’s conservative values

I like to think that Boris Johnson’s rambling performance at the CBI this week was a satire against the organisation which he (rightly) dislikes. But I may well be wrong: it is equally likely to have been a Johnsonian cock-up. Either way, he did well to get memorably on the right side of Peppa Pig,

Any other business

Why you should be wary of buy now pay later

Are you logged on to Klarna, Clearpay, Laybuy or Zilch for your Black Friday shopping binge — or are you an old-timer like me who still uses traditional credit cards and even sometimes tries to pay for purchases in cash? If those four brand names meant nothing to you, you are yet to join the