Spectator Life

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 plainly a pretty well-off country with plenty of money left to splash on railways and hospitals and frigates.

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. We’ve also discussed technology and AI. James’s views of AI were always like his politics: centrist, clever, moderate, sceptical.

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! And it’s near the solstice! And doesn’t it all have something to do with Mithras anyway?

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).

Like Ebenezer Scrooge, we are all visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past. At this time of year, people and events that have gone before feel closer at hand – both the personal and the historical. One of the main ways we experience this is through our tradition of Christmas carols. A recent YouGov survey showed that 14 per cent of Britons usually attend a carol service. Not as high as one would hope, but attendance rates are rising: in 2023, Church of England Christmas services alone saw a 20 per cent leap in attendance. I sense 2025 is already continuing the trend. Yet many churches will be pointlessly squandering the opportunity by continuing a fad which both turns off newcomers and lets down regulars: modernised Christmas carols.

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 wouldn’t be needed after all. But Gawd, have I been waiting a long time. It was 41 years ago that I first became eligible for jury service.

Like most freelance writers, I have a notepad full of jottings which come under the loose category of ‘Ideas I Probably Won’t Get Round To Doing As I Doubt Anyone Will Be Interested, They’re A Bit Rubbish Anyway And It Probably Wouldn’t Pay Much’. Around halfway down this list is a book provisionally entitled A Hard Day’s Fight, in which I espouse my opinions on a plethora of Beatles-related debates, and add a few new ones of my own.

It’s that time of year when the cards landing on the doormat compete for the title of most fatuous. Will it be a reindeer spouting an obscenity, or a painterly robin perched on a frosted gatepost in snowy landscapes? Might it be a sanitised cartoon of a coach and four outside a snow-encrusted inn, bright yellow lights glowing from within, a kind of Pickwickian fantasy of Victorian yuletide? Or will it be a trio of children around a scarfed snowman, or a Christmas tree, perhaps? Most likely it will be a sclerotic Father Christmas, or a bright Santa (that’s with a silent ‘t’) as he’s now increasingly known, dominating the foreground or flying through the air on his sledge over a snowy landscape, even though it never snows any more.

It is estimated that, sometime in the past few months, the content on the internet produced by AI finally overtook content produced by the human mind. In other words, if you go online these days – from YouTube to X, from Facebook to TikTok to can-that-really-be-a-fetish.com – you are more likely than not to be looking through, gasping about, or getting horribly enraged at something created by a silent machine. And I am afraid to say The Spectator, at least in this article, is not going to be an exception. What I am about to tell you, or show you, is partly written by AI – in this case GPT5. However – of course, there is a however – I have a good reason for dousing you with ‘AI slop’. I want to prove that it isn’t always slop, certainly not when it comes to antiques.

I was driving my daughter to school recently when we tuned into Heart Breakfast. A caller was attempting to answer five Christmas-related questions that, if successful, would mean that the countdown to the big day could ‘officially begin’. They weren’t hard but when the questions were answered correctly, there was pandemonium in the Heart studios. Everyone gushed with excitement and wished each other a Merry Christmas, co-host Amanda Holden cried, and the first of very many broadcasts of Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want for Christmas’ began. It was 10 November – more than six weeks before Christmas Day. It was so unseasonably warm that people were still in shorts. The mind boggles. As I’ve aged, I’ve grown more curmudgeonly about Christmas.

If Christmas is a time for giving then it seems the message isn’t getting through to nearly enough office managers. For the umpteenth year running, I’m getting the annual stream of resigned-sounding complaints from friends who have office-based careers. Office life has its perks, of course; unlike my mostly-bed-and-airport-based freelance life, you actually know what you’re going to be paid at the end of each month. But my decision to accept the Faustian pact of being a sole trader never feels more validated than when my pals tell me about the plan for their office Christmas party – and the demand that they pay for it themselves.

Winston Churchill and his arch enemy Adolf Hitler didn’t have a lot in common, but one passion they did share was painting: both the heroic wartime prime minister and the genocidal Nazi dictator were keen amateur artists. While auction houses are reluctant to handle or sell Hitler’s landscapes for obvious reasons, Churchill’s pictures have vastly increased in value since his death. One study of a Moroccan mosque, which the great man painted after the Casablanca conference in 1943, was acquired by actors Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt when they married. After they divorced, Jolie sold the picture in 2021 for £7 million.

Last week a Radiohead-head friend offered me a ticket for the last of their run of shows at London’s O2 Arena. The poor, deluded fool had paid several hundred quid and was looking to recoup. I politely declined, saying I would rather suffer from decompression sickness. My friend was not amused – but then that’s Radiohead fans for you; liking the band is a serious business. The band is currently on a mega tour of Europe and the reviews have been mixed. Some fans complain about the relentless flashing imagery, while others have pointed out that hanging gauze curtains around a circular stage might not be the best way to feel close to your heroes. Not that they’d be missing much. I mean, you’d hardly describe Radiohead as flamboyant showmen.

There may well be, somewhere in this nation of ours, a long-established succession of sensitive, emotionally aware 14-year-olds who can appreciate and denounce the impact of bullying. But, honestly, none of them went to my school.  It doesn’t sound like there were many of this cadre at Dulwich College half a century ago either. At least, not if we believe the recent Guardian ‘scoop’ which claims, thanks to the testimony of Nigel Farage’s fellow pupils (much of which was made public years ago), that the Reform leader was a racist, hate-fuelled youth who taunted anyone of a different faith or ethnicity.

When a survey of 10,000 teachers revealed this month that Britain’s primary school pupils are increasingly relying on Americanisms (the Times front page declared ‘Trash-talking children are sounding like Americans’) I realised immediately what we needed. Rex Harrison. And if not Rex Harrison himself, then a dose of arguably his greatest role – that of Henry Higgins, the cantankerous professor of phonetics who first burst into the national consciousness in 1914 with the London premiere of Pygmalion.

When I was growing up, it was generally accepted (unless you were a football hooligan) that, however much you disagreed with someone, they were entitled to their opinion. You listened, occasionally interjecting, and then made your case – sometimes forcefully. In the end, you might agree to disagree, but you didn’t harbour any enmity. These days, the idea that a person is free to hold their own beliefs, especially if they run contrary to your own, is considered laughably old-fashioned. The aim now is to silence that individual. If necessary, you eviscerate them, figuratively – usually online. Sometimes, tragically, their views are deemed so unpalatable that they’re silenced for good.

Earlier this month, the best rock band to have come out of America in decades played London’s Roundhouse in front of 3,000 very excited British fans, all of whom sang along to every song the Alabamans played. It was the best gig I’ve been to in years, mainly because the Red Clay Strays are musically so damned good and that smart British audience got everything they were offering. It had that rowdy, joyful atmosphere that Faces gigs did in the early 1970s. Stay with me, Spectator readers.

The past few weeks has seen the pleasing spectacle of beautiful female film stars (Sydney Sweeney, Keira Knightley – even the previous Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferer Jennifer Lawrence, who once said that an orange victory would be ‘the end of the world’) refusing to toe the accepted Hollywood line on politics, be it by not kowtowing to trans activists or not accepting that everything is racist. Lawrence actually said: ‘Election after election, celebrities do not make a difference whatsoever on who people vote for’ – or as I wrote here in the spring: ‘How dim would a political party need to be to understand that not only do celeb endorsements not work, but have an actual repelling effect?

I’m owed around $680 billion. Some 77 acres of downtown Manhattan belong to the Carter family, according to a letter written in 1894. Wall Street, Broadway and One World Trade Center – they all sit on a plot that is, by rights, mine. Yet here I am, grumbling about what ought to be in the pages of The Spectator. What went wrong? The story goes something like this. Shortly before independence, a pirate called Robert Edwards was licensed by the British to hunt down Spanish ships. He was so successful that the Crown gave him a slice of Manhattan as a reward. Edwards leased the land for 99 years to two brothers and subsequently died, lost at sea. That lease expired in 1877 and was supposed to be apportioned off to Edwards’s heirs. But that never happened.

There are several class actions going on against developers of Large Language Models. Jodi Picoult, George R.R. Martin, John Grisham and several other well-known authors are among those engaging in long-drawn-out lawsuits with tech companies such as Meta (who developed the chatbot LLaMA), OpenAI (who developed ChatGPT) and Google DeepMind (who developed Gemini). These companies, without seeking permission (imagine!), used books, newspapers, websites and other text sources to generate datasets to train their machines. The lawyers for these tech companies claim it was ‘fair use’. No one actually copied and resold anything, they say; it was used to train, and only to train.  One of my novels was ‘scraped’ by Meta, and features, in a tiny way, in the lawsuit.