I still hang out with the same two lovable crackheads I sat beside on the first day of primary school. I keep all the stubs from every concert I’ve ever been to. I meet the same school dads in the same pub on the same night every single week and my point is that I’m a creature of habit. It takes a lot to change my mind, but enough is enough. I’m ending a lifetime of support for my beloved Labour party as 2025 draws to a disastrous close. This nightmarish, totalitarian rabble has done more damage to our country than Margaret Thatcher and the Luftwaffe put together.
Flushed with self-importance at being asked to write for The Spectator’s Christmas issue this year, I told my wife that I planned to announce my resignation as a party member as a throat-grabbing opener to this column, but she dashed my ambitions and told me I was too late. ‘Oh, I cancelled your membership six months ago,’ she informed me. ‘I refuse to give that man another penny.’
What’s interesting about this is that my wife is completely apolitical and this is the first government she has ever truly loathed. Was it compulsory digital ID that sent her over the edge? The end of trial by jury? The destruction of the high street with national insurance hikes for employers? The fact that you have more chance of seeing Santa Claus than your local GP this Christmas? No, it was its carefully planned destruction of the countryside that seems to have turned my wife into a blonde Gerry Adams. Her parents are farmers, as is her brother, and she comes from a long line of people whose only real crime is minding their own business and supplying the country with dinner every night.
But it’s not all doom and gloom. Christmas Day is just around the corner and I’ve already started buying all the bad-taste presents my pals and I traditionally get for one another. One year I gave a friend a bottle of wine I’d half-drunk and re-corked, another received 500 tins of Spam (he’s vegetarian). A couple of years back I bought the best man at my wedding a six-foot statue of a Native American being attacked by a bear and it was so heavy it took four drunk men to carry it in. But this is how Scottish guys show affection for one another, I explain to my gentle, half-English children. You have to really love someone to buy them terrible gifts. An insult is a Glasgow hug, as our great comedian Kevin Bridges once observed.
I do occasionally buy loved ones something thoughtful, though, usually on eBay and always a gift they either had as a child or desperately wanted. There’s something that lights up the faces of any adult when they open the wrapping paper and see a Whizzer and Chips annual they used to own when they were eight or the Astro Wars video game they begged their mother to buy them 40 years ago. An old neighbour of mine was in the RAF during the war and I tracked down a vintage Hawker Typhoon Airfix model for him, still in the box and ready to be built and painted with all the appropriate camouflage colours. His eyes went wide as he opened it up, delighted it wasn’t just another pair of slippers, and his excitement was as palpable as it would have been when he was ten. There’s a reason we dress our houses up as they looked in old times every year, and it’s a celebration and reminder of everything we used to be when we looked at the world in a different way, all our loved ones still around us. For one day and one day only we’re those little boys and girls again, and every familiar touchstone is precious. ‘I used to fly one of these in 1944,’ my neighbour told me as he cooed over his Hawker. ‘Really?’ I replied, stepping out of range. ‘I always assumed you flew Messerschmitts in the war.’ Again, I stress, an insult is a Glasgow hug.
The youngest of my many children is in her final year of prep school now and it struck me that this will be the last time I see the fruits of my loins in a nativity play or at a carol concert, after non-stop tea-towel Virgin Marys clutching plastic Baby Jesuses for 23 consecutive years. Would it be weird to come back next Christmas when my final daughter will have moved to senior school? Will there be men at the door to keep people like me away?
My wife is truly the nicest person I know and I try to buy her something special every year, but it always seems a shame not to buy her something silly too, and so I’ve been putting together a few ideas. At the moment it’s either the Snooker Legends calendar 1995 or signing her up to the Young Communist League of Britain. In the meantime, a Merry Christmas to you all and here’s to a better 2026.
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