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Hello and welcome to the edition podcast. The Spectators weekly look at some of the most intriguing and important issues within our pages with the writers behind them.

I'm Cindy Yu.

This week, we ask, where's Boris gone?

We also talk about a surge in gang-related violent crime in Sweden.

And at the very end, a look at why the Japanese are so much happier to wear masks. First up, whether it's a muddled illiberal approach to COVID or a hardline stance on Brexit,

or coming late in defence of Britain in the culture wars, Boris Johnson's record as Prime

Minister seems to have been pretty luckluster. That's what Fraser Nelson argues in this week's cover

piece, and he joins me for a podcast now, together with Stuart Jackson, director of Political

Insight, the government advisory firm, who was also a former MP. So, Fraser, to start off, can you give

listeners a brief overview of how the Prime Minister has seemed to be missing action?

I think what we're seeing is a big difference between the Boris Johnson that his party thought

they were electing this time last year and the character we've seen so far during the pandemic. For this while,

it looked as if it was quite familiar that here was essentially a liberal conservative. That's how

he described himself. Somebody who was very reluctant to lock down, perhaps too reluctant. Britain was

one of the last countries in Europe to do so. It looked as if Britain and Sweden were going to be the only two countries doing that. Then he changed his mind drastically. Then he fell ill. He almost died in hospital. And there was a moment there where I remember the spectator, we were actually literally having to do an obituary of him because he was in hospital

of a day before we went to press. We had all of these macabre covers which thankfully we didn't

have to use. But when he returns, there was a brief while where people thought that, okay,

he's not, he's convalescing. Of course, Dominic Rab is in charge. But since then, there hasn't

really been a return of the

character that Tory MPs expected, somebody who's able to raise the nation's spirits, to be

leading, to be like bombastic, effervescence. And if you look at the debacle this week, it really

...