Some years ago, I resigned my entire Christmas and New Year’s viewing schedule to live sport. Sick to the teeth of The Chase, Home Alone and special editions of entirely “mid” sitcoms, I decided that the only way to cope with the onslaught of schmaltz would be a punishing and totally unsentimental schedule of boxing, football and darts. Clearly, I’m not the only one who’s developed the same coping mechanism. On the day of the PDC World Championship final (3 January), the stars of the festive period have been the men (and boys) at the oche. Now a decade into an enormous hype cycle, the competition has become one of the last mass-culture events in Britain, with Luke Humphries and Luke ...

Scotland enters 2025 in conflicted spirits. It has decided that independence isn’t, for now, a priority. It played its part in electing a new Labour government and removing the Tories from office. This would suggest some certainty of purpose, but that would be to misunderstand the national mood. Keir Starmer has so far been largely disappointing. The SNP is once again ahead in the polls, suggesting many Scots have yet to give up on Holyrood’s governing party, even as it enters its 18th year in office and after a couple of years that have largely been dominated by scandal and policy failure. And voters are now looking ahead to next year’s Scottish parliament election wondering what they should do. Hope that Anas Sarwar’s ...

One of the most surreal moments from 2024 – the moment, perhaps, that I realised “politics as normal” no longer existed – was watching Elon Musk get into a spat on Twitter-now-X over free speech laws in the UK with the account that pretends to be the Downing Street Cat. Finally the cross-border memeification of political discourse was complete. The owner of Tesla appears to be obsessed with UK politics. And that obsession makes headlines here: both because of his place in Donald Trump’s cabinet, and as someone teasing Reform with the prospect of a game-changing political donation. But his grasp of British political culture is flimsy. And why shouldn’t it be? The South African anarchic tech-futurist isn’t a British citizen. ...

In 2012 a cache of emails between members of a Russian pro-Putin youth group, Nashi, was leaked online. The emails revealed that young Russians were being paid to create thousands upon thousands of fake online personas, which they would use to douse any online news article that criticised Vladimir Putin with negative comments. YouTube videos from activists such as Alexei Navalny would be stifled by downvotes, while others were paid to generate blogs and videos to create the illusion of widespread support for the Putin regime.   Russia was far from the only government to use such practices. In 2013 a report by the think tank Freedom House recorded “paid progovernment commentators” at work in 22 countries, “particularly surrounding politically sensitive ...

The big question for the Conservatives in 2025: do they stick with their leader? Or, if you’re of a more certain and less charitable persuasion, how long do they stick with their leader? You might have missed it in amid the non-stop travails of the Labour government, but Kemi Badenoch is not doing well. Week after week at PMQs, Badenoch is presented with open goals (and fails to score). For all the delusional optimism at the Conservative Party Conference in October as Labour slumped in the polls, the Tories are not benefiting from Keir Starmer’s plummeting popularity. It is Nigel Farage’s Reform party that seems to be capitalising on disillusionment with mainstream politics, with the three parties now wallowing around the ...

“It is with a very heavy heart,” then prime minister Boris Johnson told a press conference one Saturday four years ago, “I must tell you we cannot continue with Christmas as planned.” With the festive season just days away, and much of the country about to start moving about, Covid restrictions were to tighten again. But the new restrictions would not come into force until midnight. That gave everyone nearly eight hours to get out of dodge before they’d technically be breaking the rules. And so many did, bringing forward travel plans, piling onto trains which were very possibly plague-ridden. Within three hours, tickets on many train lines had sold out, and health secretary Matt Hancock was calling those opting to travel ...

The literary world is in uproar because the Booker Prize has its newest celebrity judge. It’s Sex and the City star Sarah Jessica Parker, who appears to be a genuinely enthusiastic fiction reader. She voted in this year’s New York Times poll to pick the best books of the 21st century (The Bee Sting, The Corrections, The Goldfinch) and owns a publishing imprint specialising in “sweeping, expansive, thought-provoking and discussion-driven stories.” This self-conscious turn from TV frivolity to the world of serious ideas is fun and campy: as Susan Sontag said, "camp sees everything in question marks… it is the furthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theatre." Parker has gone from playing the role of a sex ...

The appointment of Peter Mandelson – former cabinet minister under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and former EU trade commissioner – as ambassador to the US has divided opinion. Supporters commend him as an experienced heavyweight. While sceptics question his judgement (he called Donald Trump “a bully” in 2018) and his advocacy for closer ties with China (at odds with the position of the Trump administration). There are countless reasons to believe that he is not the right person for the job – not least when candidates with an established relationship with the new American right were eschewed for a politician with considerable baggage. It is, however, exceedingly rare that a diplomat’s character itself would damage a relationship between allies. Trump ...