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Something very strange is happening in Britain at the moment. Look at the economy. Things aren’t really too bad: for a start it’s actually growing, if only a little. At the same time, inflation is falling. Real incomes are on the rise too – with earnings going up 4.4 per cent in the year to October, while inflation was 3.6 per cent. Meanwhile unemployment is at 5.1 per cent, which isn’t terrible. The government is raking in the sorts of taxes that would make the Sheriff of Nottingham weep with joy; and yet our taxes as a percentage of GDP are still only a hair above the OECD average – so, in other words, we are

It feels, pleasingly, like a scene from a cerebral James Bond film, or perhaps an episode of Slow Horses. I am in a shadowy corner of a plush, buzzy Soho members’ bar. A mild December twilight is falling over London. Across the table from me sits an old acquaintance, a senior English barrister, greying, quietly handsome, in his mid fifties. And he wants to speak anonymously, because what he is about to say will earn the loathing of his entire profession. Let’s call him James. I’ve known him for a few years, and over these years we’ve discussed all kinds of things, from politics to architecture to the misfortunes of Chelsea FC.

At some point during this Advent season and the coming of Christmas, you will log on to your computer, and you will see somebody smugly opining that ‘actually Christmas is a pagan festival’. This person will not know anything about pagans, bar some fuzzy ideas about equinoxes (always with the equinoxes) and sacrifice. The reasons given for this will vary: we put up trees in our houses and decorate them, just like pagans! We light candles! And we give presents, like the Romans did at Saturnalia or the Vikings at Yule or [insert random pagan festival here]. And 25 December is actually the festival of the Roman god Sol Invictus!

Sometime in mid-October, my husband and I begin our annual deliberation: should we host a village Christmas drinks party? The conversation is almost invariably instigated by my charming husband who, mindful of all the invitations we have shamefully yet to reciprocate, feels that we ‘ought to do it this year, at least’. Almost invariably, I am the voice of dissent.  The arguments I give against are motivated by two competing – but not entirely dissimilar – emotions: vanity and concern. Vanity because I worry that my house is neither big enough nor grand enough for the sort of event I have in mind (think something along the lines of a reception at St James’s Palace, complete with hot and cold running staff and Old Masters jammed on to every wall). Concern, in this

Back in the early 1990s, I was a teenage visitor to an array of dilapidated Victorian cow sheds masquerading as third and fourth division football grounds as I supported my team, Wrexham FC, on their travels. There were still many pre-Hillsborough fences in place, some of which (most notably in the away end at Crewe Alexandra’s Gresty Road ground) successfully blocked around 90 per cent of the view of the pitch for visiting fans. The catering usually only extended to ‘botulism in a bap’ burger vans and it was always, always cold. But what I remember most clearly from those far-off days was the voice register of the fans when

Strong course form is always a major plus for horses contesting races at Cheltenham, whether it is at the Festival in March or any other meeting at the track. The trouble when evaluating the merits of the runners in the tomorrow’s big race, The Support the Hunt Family Fund December Gold Cup Handicap Chase, (1.50 p.m.), is that all three horses vying for favouritism have run big races at Cheltenham. So, too, have several of the others in the race so it is difficult to rule out many of the 11 runners. Jagwar, Hoe Joly Smoke and Vincenzo are at the top of the market and of the three the

David Lammy’s proposal to do away with jury trials for all but the most serious offences has a consequence which hasn’t so far been aired in national debate. It could deprive me of the chance to bang up some evildoer. Whoops! Saying that probably won’t help me realise my ambition. I think it was the wonderful Mary Killen who once suggested to an anguished correspondent, worried that his holiday would be ruined after being selected for jury service, that he write to His Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service saying pretty much what I have just said. In return, she wrote, he should expect a letter informing him that actually he

In Terence Rattigan’s 1948 play The Browning Version (filmed in 1951 starring Michael Redgrave), a public-school classics teacher called Arthur Crocker-Harris is appalled to discover that he is known to his pupils as ‘the Himmler of the Fifth’. According to the Guardian and the BBC, the Reform UK leader Nigel Farage was a fan of Himmler’s boss, Adolf Hitler, when he was a student at Dulwich public school half a century ago. I suspect that those who are enthusiastically mining this story for its anti-Farage political potential did not attend single-sex male boarding schools in the 1970s. Given the war had ended just a few decades before, it was scarcely