Gareth Roberts

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.

As Liz Truss prepares to leave Downing Street after 47 days in power, the PM’s reputation is in tatters. Seeing out the reigning monarch after seventy years, spooking the financial markets like a distant hyena terrifies a family of meerkats, and, incredibly, tanking the Tories’ poll rating to its lowest ever level at the same time as paying everybody’s gas bill. But listen, Liz. I wouldn’t worry. Because it doesn’t take very long before people start pining for and eulogising former prime ministers that drove them potty when they actually were in office. Just this weekend gone, singer Tanita Tikaram sent a much-liked tweet saying she would like Gordon Brown back.

The Christian Roman Emperor Theodosius had the Delphic Oracle smashed up in 390 AD, but the gifts of the old gods were already well on the way out. The Sibylline Books were burned shortly after. Scrying glasses across the ancient world had misted over. The prophets fell silent. Well, they hadn’t seen that coming. It was now impossible to foresee what was going to happen next, let alone any further down the line. You can see where I’m going with this. Who will be prime minister at the end of the week? What brave new policies, set in stone days ago, will be forgotten like waking dreams?

‘Grow the pie’. Somebody thought ‘grow the pie’ was The Thing, that ‘grow the pie’ was it. That this knockout phrase would silence the army of doubters and bring millions of voters back on side. They were proud of ‘grow the pie’. They thought ‘grow the pie’ was a great idea that people can really relate to and get behind. The same kind of person who thought reviving The Generation Game with Mel and Sue, or that Crown paint advert with the dead-eyed cult singing about ‘Hannah and Dave’ were notions of genius. Grow the pie – biff bang pow, now what’s your comeback to that, eh? Did they test it out on anyone else before Liz Truss’s speech at Tory party conference?

Our common culture – the huge audiences that tv, film and pop music used to attract – has evaporated. Politics is about the only thing remaining where we are all on the same page. It’s perhaps inevitable then that public reaction has become ever more febrile and volatile. Poll percentages now go crashing and soaring with a regularity that’s disturbing to those of us who can remember the prelapsarian age when we were the only people who gave a stuff about politics and that we were considered odd because of it. The marked outlandishness of British party politics has been evident since that day in September 2015 when Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour party.

Recent sad events have seen everybody behaving exactly as you would expect. There’s nothing wrong about that. A certain continuity of conduct is reassuring, a truism that the late Queen herself exemplified better than anyone. Her job was to be regal. Similarly, it’s the job of chippy academics to spill their thoughts, of the New York Times to froth at length, and, of course, of mad actors to be mad. It might be argued that the job of an actor is to act, but such an objection belongs to a vanished world and certainly does not apply to the actors who have moved beyond simply saying other people’s words for a living. We were blessed by two fine examples this week.

The Conservative party leadership contest (sometimes referred to as a ‘race’, which is pushing it) is nearing its end. It’ll be hard getting used to the world without it. We’re all such different people now, 900 years on. At least we’ll always have the misty water-coloured memories. One thing that both candidates agree on is that things have come to a pretty pass, and something, possibly even lots of somethings, must be done, and done urgently. This has been very strange to behold, as if the Tories have just woken up in a parallel universe where some other mysterious and nefarious political party has been in power for the last 12 years.

We’re being asked to credit Liz Truss with a lot of unlikely things now that’s she almost certainly on course for No. 10 – that she’s a snazzy, relaxed media performer; that she can solve the eruption of problems caused by decades of cross-party can-kicking in a few weeks; that she has Churchillian resolve and Thatcherite implacability. But just recently a new claim is surfacing, very much not coming from her ‘people’, which is the hardest to swallow of all – that she is a fascist.