Gareth Roberts

When Covid first hit the headlines in early 2020, I remember asking myself a question: who’s the health secretary again? And then I remembered: Oh God. Matt Hancock is, you may have noticed, back in the news. The disgraced ex-health secretary doesn’t ever seem to be out of it for very long. But even prior to the pandemic – before we came to know and love Hancock, in those innocent days before his weeping, before his red-hot doorway loving, before his gulping of blended sheep vagina – he did not inspire confidence. Hancock had that Alan Partridge joke of a branded app for a start. Then there was his unprepossessing demeanour; he looked cocky and guilty at the same time.

The recent self-defenestration of Nicola Sturgeon led to a rash of columns listing her dazzling lack of actual achievements, many of which added the caveat that she was the consummate, in fact the most successful, politician of her generation. These statements seemed somewhat contradictory at first glance. But then the reader remembered – oh, yeah, right – the other politicians of her generation.  Looking back over the last 13 years of Tory governance, it’s hard to find anything to stick laurels on. Brexit was an achievement, yes, but that was foisted on the Tories by an uncooperative public, and the Tories tried their damndest to wriggle out of it even then (and they still might).

I have a problem with magic. Even as a small child with a big imagination, I found magic very hard to swallow. If a character in a story teleported using a technological aid, that was fine. If a character vanished in a magical puff of smoke after an incantation, I was having none of it.  I became aware of the Harry Potter book series quite early for a childless adult. A friend worked in a central London bookshop and was tiring of parents descending in their lunch hours enquiring ‘do you have any of these books by Harry Potter?’ Intrigued, I read the first two – the only two at the time – to see what all the growing fuss was about.

Liz Truss’s recent written confession is remarkable for its childlike air. It reminded me of my buck-passing wheedling whenever I was caught doing something naughty aged about eleven; ‘No, I didn’t know what I was doing – but neither did the Treasury, yeah what about the Treasury, eh, mum?’ I can remember when the British disease, being the ‘sick man of Europe’, etc, was a national obsession but mostly of the right and the reactionary. Think of the low-status laughs to be had from Basil Fawlty bemoaning ‘more strikes!’ or Alan Partridge tutting and muttering ‘This country …’ But in the 2020s doominess seems to be the default for everyone, all sides of the political spectrum.

An urgent ecumenical update: the conclave has taken place. The great community leader has descended from the summit of Sinai, bearing, not tablets of law, but sorrowful tidings. Yes: the Archbishop of Canterbury has ‘grabbed a coffee’ with Sandi Toksvig, following her twee plea for an audience a few months ago on the subject of the Church of England’s attitude to gay sex.  The good news is that the ‘long-promised coffee’ was 'calm and considered,’ according to Toksvig. The bad news is that Sandi is sad: Justin Welby had to report, unsurprisingly to anyone paying the slightest attention, that any change in the Anglican Communion’s stance on same-sex relations is likely to be – in Sandi’s words – ‘glacial’.

Spare us from feeble, timid Tories. At times, the party's MPs are so afraid of what the Guardian or their daft teenage kids might say they forget they are supposed to be conservative. Take the party's laggard attitude to months of protests; or the total disaster of the Channel migrant boats crisis; or mimsying about with the universities freedom of speech bill. Do they really think this approach is going to win them the next election? Remarkably, there’s something even worse than mere squirming incompetence and conflict avoidance: the airy nonchalance of a certain strain of Tory MP. Even MPs touted as future leadership hopefuls are guilty.

We don’t have a standardised name for the little clutch of strange days between Christmas and New Year. There is an aesthetic to Boxing Day – hearty walks, reheated leftovers, scraps of wrapping paper – but from then till New Years Eve we enter an in between time. I’ve heard several informal and colloquial references to it, things like The Lull, The Interregnum, The Aftermath – but the lack of a recognised term seems fitting. There is the merest echo of the pre-modern twelve days of Christmas, or Twelvetide, though nowadays we are all back at work long before the drummers drumming make their appearance.  No name means no rules, no rituals, nothing in particular that you should or should not be doing.

It’s Christmas – again. For old timers like me, the familiarity of this time of year can blunt the strangeness of what we celebrate: the birth of Christ. The basic moral Christian precepts that Jesus embodied are also easy to take for granted. Do as you would be done by, love your neighbour, think of the poor; we accept these Christian attitudes, mistake them for innate human qualities, and rarely stop to think about them. The concepts go unexamined, embedded in our culture after centuries, though now minus any superhuman authority.  What we’ve forgotten is that these are peculiar, counterintuitive ideas that literally set the world on fire. They established themselves so deeply that they’ve survived the religion that instituted them.

If a visitor to my house suggested they had been abused and verbally attacked when they came to tea, I probably wouldn’t be in a particular hurry to invite them round again for nibbles. If that person had subsequently caused a very public stink and embarrassed and humiliated a valued family friend of extremely long standing, I would most definitely give them up as a bad idea. I certainly wouldn’t invite them for ‘talks’.  But this is pretty much the approach taken by the King and Queen Consort to Ngozi Fulani, the domestic abuse campaigner who says she was asked repeatedly where she was 'really' from when she visited Buckingham Palace last week.

It’s somehow appropriate that Matt Hancock finished third in the 2022 series of I’m A Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here! Third is a word that fits him neatly. Third choice. Third wheel. Third rate. Third is the ‘and you did great, too!’ of victories. The day before, Hancock had donned the brass hot pants of ‘the Bronze Bronco’ for the annual Cyclone challenge, as if bottom rung on the podium already belonged to him.  His continued presence in the jungle – as straightforward, likeable contestants such as Charlene White and Mike Tindall, and less affable ‘characters’ like Boy George and Chris Moyles fell by the wayside – had started to rattle some of the commentariat. To be fair, these people are already fairly rattled on a good day.