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Society

Friday

Ross Clark Ross Clark

What was Badenoch hoping to achieve with her attack on Farage?

Kemi Badenoch believes she has caught out Nigel Farage with a bit of digital sleuthing. No sooner had Farage announced that the official membership of Reform has surpassed the 132,000 declared membership of the Conservative Party than Badenoch declared it is all a con. All Badenoch has really achieved is to emphasise how shrunken the Conservative party has become “Manipulating your own followers at Xmas, eh Nigel?” she tweeted on Boxing Day. The counter that Reform has been showing us is a fake, she declared. “It is designed to tick up automatically. We’ve been watching the back end for days, and can also see that they have just changed the code

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

The problem with rugby union

Rugby union has always attracted a certain type, the ‘play hard, party hard’ sort. I remember a former teammate – a prop, perhaps not surprisingly – who could drink a pint of his urine in under ten seconds. An England prop, Colin Smart, once downed a bottle of after shave after a Five Nations match and spent the evening having his stomach pumped in a Paris hospital. That was in the 1980s, the same decade when England’s Dean Richards and Scotland’s John Jeffrey took the Calcutta Cup for a tour of Edinburgh pubs after a match. As one of them later quipped – probably before he was presented with the

David Shipley

How can we stop football academy rejects ending up in prison?

‘The first team at Wormwood Scrubs is said to be better than QPR’s’. That line from Toby Young’s article from November has stuck with me. Could it be true? Are our jails full of talented footballers who didn’t quite make it? Are players regularly ‘spat out’ without any qualifications? Is there an academy-to-prison pipeline? One day, Brian was at a friend’s house when his dreams were shattered To find out, I spoke to some former academy players who had been to prison. ‘Brian’, who played for a London first division club’s academy in the mid-2000s, missed a lot of school to train. He’d leave classes at lunchtime on Wednesday for

Iain Macwhirter

My part in Twitter’s downfall

Two years ago, I was the victim of a peculiarly postmodern version of left-wing cancel culture. After joking on Twitter about the Tory government being a ‘coconut cabinet’, I was given the boot by the Herald, a newspaper where I had worked for 20 years. My downfall was swift. People I trusted turned on me ruthlessly. But I don’t think my tweet – whipped up by a handful of performative offence-takers – would have led to my cancellation had it happened in 2024. Why? Because Twitter/X has changed beyond all recognition. It no longer has a chokehold on political culture. Elon Musk has done the world a favour, even if the

Thursday

Alexander Larman

This has been an awful year for the royals

At the beginning of King Charles’s Christmas speech this year, viewers may have been surprised when he did not immediately talk about his, or his family’s, struggles with illness this year, but instead about the 80th anniversary of D-Day. It was, in fact, several minutes until the speech made reference to how ‘all of us go through some form of suffering at some stage in our life, be it mental or physical.’ Despite the controversies and confusions of the past year, there is still widespread support for the monarchy After that, it was open season on talking about his difficulties, as the king said: ‘I offer special, heartfelt thanks to

Charlotte Henry

The joy of Boxing Day football

Whether it’s food, music or movies, this time of the year is all about traditions. To my mind, there are few better than Boxing Day football. Across the country, fans like me partake in the ritual of watching our team play a match, the result of which can make or break our Christmas. Teams in other top European leagues get a two-week break over Christmas. But while our neighbours on the continent might enjoy their football-free festivities, over here we have a packed schedule. The number of games being played in just a few days means Boxing Day marks the start of a crucial period of the season. Lose a

Alexander Larman

Beware the middle of Lidl

If you’re a regular, or even an occasional, customer at Lidl, you’ll know what to expect. Own-brand foodstuffs that shamelessly imitate better-known manufacturers and, by doing so, flirt with copyright infringement right up to the edge of legality; a selection of wines, spirits and beers that alternate between excellent value for the money and frankly undrinkable; and, most famously of all, the middle aisle. Slowly, step away from the Middle of Lidl. Your dignity will thank you later For the uninitiated, the middle aisle at Lidl has a unique attraction, mainly for men. It seems to have been based on the sketch from The Fast Show in which a man

Wednesday

Alexander Larman

Why the King’s speech still matters

Later today, the King will address the nation, as he has annually since he acceded the throne in September 2022. This year’s is expected not only to be the most eagerly anticipated and arguably momentous speech that Charles has delivered, but also probably since his mother attempted to make some sense of the chaotic, grief-stricken events of 1997. The King will undoubtedly address his own health struggles, and almost certainly refer to those of his daughter-in-law, the Princess of Wales, as well. And then there are the issues of global conflict, a new prime minister and government, and, for light relief, his continued estrangement from his troublesome younger son. At

Druin Burch

Life and death on the hospital ward at Christmas

Most people shudder at the thought of working on Christmas Day. Not me. I’ve worked as a hospital doctor since 2000 and, most years, come 25 December, I’ll be doing the ward round. As a junior doctor, I didn’t have much choice about doing the Christmas Day shift. But since becoming a consultant, I have usually volunteered for Christmas, and am used to working when others are tucking into their turkey and opening their presents. How lonely must those souls be to regard staying on the wards as festive? I recall being bad tempered one early start, knowing I was missing my two young kids’ excitement, but otherwise the pattern

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

When will the BBC stop adapting Julia Donaldson books?

Another Christmas, another BBC adaptation of a Julia Donaldson story. This time it’s an animated version of Tiddler, the story of a little fish who is always late for school and who makes up tall stories to explain why. The tall stories get around the ocean and when Tiddler gets caught by a fishing boat and tossed back in the sea, he is able to find his way home to Miss Skate and her lesson by following his own stories. Aww. As the CBeebies storyteller observed, ‘What make us powerful is not how big we are but by what’s inside.’ A perfect parable for our day then. The BBC is

Andrew Ziminski

The ancient depictions of the Nativity in England’s churches

For hundreds of years, the 12 days of Christmas have been a significant highlight of the English religious year. In the medieval period, churches in Britain and Ireland were vividly adorned with paintings, stained glass, and sculptures that depicted the Christmas story. Many of these images were destroyed in the Taliban-like wave of destruction that accompanied the English Reformation. But ancient depictions of the Nativity still exist in our churches – as long as you know where to look.  Nativity scenes were uncommon during the early medieval period but they began to be carved into our baptismal fonts from around the 12th century. One of the earliest surviving examples in the UK

Tuesday

Geoff Hill

South Africa dreams of a black Christmas

It’s 38C outside and I’m in a Johannesburg hypermarket owned by the Pick n Pay chain, one of the biggest in South Africa. Despite the heat, their music system has a woman singing ‘Let it snow!’ and songs themed around winter and chestnuts roasting on the fire. In rural areas, the scotch cart is common, a topless buggy pulled by cattle or donkeys, but few here can describe what ‘a one-horse open sleigh’ might look like. Across Pick n Pay and its major competitor known as Checkers, all the Santa props have a light complexion. Not even a black elf. Real holly would wilt in the sun, though it’s grown

Terry Barnes

Australia’s godless Christmas

As Christmas comes around again, we will discover that Australia is no longer a Christian country. According to the most recent census in 2021, Christianity is not a majority faith here and, of its denominations, none has declined more rapidly than Anglicanism – which has lost more than a third of its declared adherents since the turn of this century. Meanwhile, steadily growing non-Christian faiths are headed by Islam, which claimed over 3 per cent of Australians in 2021. Muslims in Australia now outnumber Jews by more than eight to one. Furthermore, the main Anglican and Catholic denominations are more C and E – Christmas and Easter – than C

Angela Epstein

Why this Jew loves Christmas

Merry Christmas – or perhaps, I should say, Season’s Greetings. The festive period can be something of a minefield for the culturally sensitive: even a presumptive or mis-worded greeting, however well meant, may be misconstrued as an affront to diversity and an expression of non-inclusivity. Not least to those who don’t celebrate Christmas, perhaps due to their ethnicity or religion. Being Jewish, this must surely then include me. After all, I don’t sing Christmas carols or believe in the chap with the white beard. So shouldn’t the greatest care be taken when offering greetings of the season or making mention of pigs – pigs! – in blankets? When I make

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Why was C.S. Lewis such a killjoy at Christmas? A discussion with Alister McGrath

27 min listen

Which 20th-century Scrooge had the following to say about the celebration of Christmas?  ‘It gives on the whole much more pain than pleasure… Anyone can force you to give him a present by sending you a quite unprovoked present of his own. It’s almost blackmail… Can it really be my duty to buy and receive masses of junk every winter just to help the shopkeepers?’ Step forward C.S. Lewis, beloved Christian apologist and children’s author, whose splenetic denunciation of ‘the whole dreary business’ of Christmas and mean-spirited comments about carol singers are hard to reconcile with his reputation for benevolence. To make sense of the author’s views, Damian Thompson is

Francis Young

How Santa came to recruit his elves

The Christmas elf is so familiar now that it could easily be the first character you think of when you hear the word ‘elf’ – outside of J. R. R. Tolkien’s works, that is.  The very recent Christmas custom of the ‘Elf on the Shelf’ has lately brought elves to particular prominence in the modern British Christmas. But how did Santa Claus – whose origin as a folkloric transmogrification of St Nicholas is well known – acquire elves as helpers, and who are they? The origins of the modern Christmas elf turn out to be both complex and surprising, simultaneously ancient and very modern. In the earliest sources which depict Santa living in Lapland,

Joshua Young

A Christmas Carol is the gift that keeps on giving

It was November 1843, two years after Prince Albert first introduced Britain to the tradition of the Christmas tree. Charles Dickens was 31, and yet to grow his beard. A dire report on child labour the previous year had worked him up into a compassionate rage. Just as pressingly, Dickens needed cash. The author was already famous for The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, but the public was struggling with Martin Chuzzlewit and, to top it off, his wife Catherine was pregnant again. Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in six weeks, amid explosions of laughter and tears at his desk. He knew straight away it was his best work yet,

Monday

Justin Brierley

The surprising truth about the West’s Christian revival

When weeping Parisians watched Notre Dame, the city’s beloved 800-year-old cathedral, being consumed by a devastating fire in 2019, it served as a sad symbol of the decimation of churchgoing itself in France. Ever since revolutionaries began decapitating priests and nuns in the 1790s, a precipitous decline in Catholic faith has been underway in the country. The ‘Last Supper’ debacle of last summer’s Olympic opening ceremony only served to cement the country’s famously secular reputation. In 2023, the number of people attending Church of England services increased by 5 per cent However, against all odds, the bells of Notre Dame will be ringing out again in time for Christmas Day.

Glynn Harrison

Come all ye unfaithful: why do we still go to carol services at Christmas?

This year, Christmas carol services are expected to draw their largest congregations since the pandemic. As numbers attending carol services swell, one central London church has appealed to its regular congregation to donate 12,000 mince pies to give away. Even in the wake of shocking revelations of religious abuse in recent years, those who rarely engage with faith may still find themselves stepping into cathedrals and parish churches this Christmas season. But why will we go? What are we looking for? Can all this sentimentalised longing really be good for us? The sights and sounds of Christmas stir emotions of altruism and goodwill, of warmth and cosiness, of well-being and

Robin Ashenden

Keir Starmer, the Christmas Grinch

If someone were to read the runes, this first Labour Christmas would not augur well. Not only have we had Keir Starmer’s excruciating ‘illuminations countdown’ in Downing Street – a joyless event if ever there was one – but also the cut-price Christmas Tree in Trafalgar Square – perhaps the mangiest conifer the Norwegians, in their gratitude, have ever been able to dump on us. A Hampshire priest has been savaged for telling children that Santa Claus doesn’t exist and now, we’re informed, Gen Z have declared an outright hostility to turkey and trimmings. Just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse, a hoohah has sprung up about the