Good morning, and happy Christmas! Stop reading your phone, your children want to play with you.
But if you must spend this sacred time with your favourite newsletter, please do not expect any goodwill or glad tidings: we will be devoting the day to our now-traditional compendium of the most obnoxious features of the year gone by. (By traditional I mean that this is the second one, I did it last year even if you don’t remember it, on the whole I found it quite a cathartic exercise, and nobody has stopped me from doing it again.)
So: here is 2023 in annoying, with the disclaimer that many more annoying things could happen in the next week and I do not intend to provide an update. You have also provided your own nominations, and several were sufficiently vexing (or entertainingly weird) to dislodge some of my own longlist. Which was annoying, so congrats on getting me into the spirit of the season. Ho ho ho, don’t be too rude to your uncle, here are the headlines.
PS: Over the Christmas period, some elements of First Edition are picked up automatically from the Guardian’s website. Full service resumes next week.
In depth: 14 things we (and you) will be glad to leave in 2023
‘The five families’
Stop trying to make the five families happen! Wisely getting ahead of unjustified smears like “pompous backbench rabble” and “self-important layabouts marking time until their inevitable defenestration in 2024”, the overlapping quintet of interest groups on the right wing of the Conservative party have started referring to themselves by this moniker, drawn with hilarious grandiosity from the history of the New York mafia.
To be fair, the mob were also fairly unpopular with the general public and ultimately collapsed in an orgy of mutual recrimination, but the more accurate analogy seems to be 90s footballer Paul Ince, who, it’s said, insisted on being called The Guv’nor to the bemusement of his teammates and had it on a personalised numberplate. The capo di tutti capi is the ERG’s Mark Francois, who claimed humbly that it was how “you in the media are now referring to us” … but who obviously has John Gotti as his WhatsApp profile picture.
The five families, you will remember, also appointed a “star chamber” of MPs with legal experience to formulate their view of the government’s most recent Rwanda legislation. The actual star chamber: a vastly powerful 16th-century court that enforced the will of the king by arbitrarily cutting people’s ears off, rather than a group of Eurosceptic lawyers with a grudge against Rishi Sunak for trying to save them from oblivion.
Harry, dragon slayer
Look, if I absolutely have to choose between the Duke of Sussex and his various columnist persecutors, I know whose side I’m on. But Christ, he doesn’t make it easy, does he? “I’ve been told that slaying dragons will get you burned,” he said, via his lawyer, after his court victory over Mirror Group newspapers. “It is a worthwhile price to pay. The mission continues.” Presumably his speechwriter has a side gig punching up Fast and the Furious scripts.
The phrase ‘X (formerly Twitter)’
And everything thereon. Possibly less annoying if you don’t have to type it all the time.
The kisses at the end of Laurence Fox’s DMs to Dan Wootton on X (formerly Twitter)
“So much fun. Xx.” VOMIT EMOJI.
The rise of the Dadcast
And you thought you’d had enough of true crime. This year, the charts have been dominated by a rapidly spawning genre of chats between very sensible fellas: Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell, Ed Balls and George Osborne, Jake Humphrey and someone with the X (formerly Twitter) handle @liquidthinker. You or your father absolutely love at least one of them, and are hoping for a six-part Seb Coe/Greg Rutherford deep dive on the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony.
Foreign secretarial hysteria
David Cameron was prime minister. Now – get this – he is foreign secretary. And he is a lord. The ghost of Edward Heath is on bass.
‘That’s a really good question’ and other interview tricks
Not really a novelty for ’23, but persistent enough to have driven quite a lot of you absolutely wild. Reader Graham Stevens rightly points out that flattering a broadcast journalist about the quality of their query is a fine way to buy a little time (and, I might add, soften them up a bit: a minor celebrity once said he loved an article I’d written two years previously about escalators, a trick somewhat undermined by the printout in front of him with my name highlighted by some PR flunky – but still made me wish him the very best).
Janet Bick wishes politicians would stop adding the line that things are world-beating “to many and varied statements about things which aren’t”. Pat Taylor has had enough of hearing about “the British people”. Brendan Rooney has no truck with the placeholder “well, look”. Karen Drury is absolutely done with MPs saying “I’ve been clear”, when in fact “the person speaking has changed their stance daily for the past two weeks”. I share your dismay, folks, and I’m sure it’ll stop now we’ve mentioned it.
Ming vase analogies
Is there some cleverclogs way of explaining why Keir Starmer can do no more than offer voters a bowl of slightly thicker gruel, and could it possibly connect him to Tony Blair? Well, it’s late breaking, but you’re in luck, and let me predict that you will be hearing it a lot in the year ahead: over the past several months, the famous analogy about 1997 as an election in which Blair had to “carry a priceless Ming vase across a highly polished floor” has been as virulent as chickenpox, and just as irritating. Got a mention from this idiot three weeks ago.
Matt Hancock’s TikTok
Low-hanging fruit, but honestly, just look at it. Answering a fan query about Newcastle United’s hopes for 23/24; ranking his favourite chocolate bars (KitKats are his go-to and Mars bars an absolute banker); ranking his favourite drinks (lager goes up his nose); bowing to wild public pressure for an audiobook of his memoir; sadly declining a slot on Dancing On Ice that nobody has offered him; tossing pancakes in a union jack apron; hopping on the #bekind hashtag; saying “BOSH”; inter alia offering a couple of token bits about his actual job as an MP; miming to Barbie smash I’m Just Ken in chino shorts (which honestly should come with a content warning). Marina Hyde: “Hancock has long served as a sort of coathanger aerial, occasionally picking up broken snatches of The Discourse.” In ’24: Matt ranks his favourite Dom Cummings WhatsApps calling him names.
Oppenheimer, Napoleon and Maestro
Notwithstanding Matt’s hopping on the bandwagon, I’m afraid I quite enjoyed the Barbenheimer opening weekend frenzy. Much more annoying was the inevitability of this trio of movies about ostensibly different men who all turned out to be tortured geniuses whose poor wives just don’t quite get how they have to live their truth but are nonetheless very supportive. Also, do I now have to treat Bradley Cooper like he’s the new Orson Welles, and not the guy who shucks a million oysters in Burnt and writes them all down in a little book?
Something something AI
AI is two things at once: a genuinely revolutionary technology that may save us from ourselves or end humanity; and a fantastically useful headline term for anyone wanting to elevate their stupefying news feature from SEO oblivion. AI will plan your Christmas, predict your death, make predictions about the coming year in mountain biking, shape the future of property and casualty insurance, change the way you think about banana cultivation, tease Gregg Wallace’s hair transformation, whatever that means, and totally funk up your toothbrush. Literally type AI + any word into Google news and you will find that everything has changed. The best guard against robots turning us into paperclips at this point may be that they’re too busy turning paperclips into news stories.
Nature
“Walk in nature?” seethes Mark Haigh. “It’s not nature, it’s simply ‘outside’”. And now he’s pointed it out, it’s going to do my nut for ever.
Farage bushtucker discourse
Did ITV get value for their £1.5m fee? Would voters be persuaded of Farage’s deep humanity by the sight of him being reunited with his girlfriend while wearing a Crocodile Dundee hat? Did producers deliberately limit his airtime? Did Farage try to manipulate the format to get as much airtime as possible? How many points in the polls did Reform gain for every minute he ate camel udders? Did EU LOVING Fred Sirieix leave him SPEECHLESS when he said he DESTROYED THE ECONOMY? Have the Brexit wars finally been concluded? When is Michel Barnier going on Love Island? Is this paragraph complicit in the very nightmare it seeks to resist? Are Ant and Dec Remainers? Do they bank with Coutts?
Christmas movies where objects are not sufficiently heavy
Jane Richards is furious: “There is nothing in the suitcase they’re carrying or lifting; no coffee and actually clearly no fluids in the takeaway coffee cups they’re drinking and finally, the lightest, clearly empty pretend Christmas present boxes they’re enthusing over … I love a happy ending and I’m being punished on the way.”
I don’t absolutely know what Jane is talking about here, but I am always on board for taking things too seriously and typing about it, so I’m giving her the full First Edition endorsement. Merry Christmas, one and all, and may your stockings be full of rocks.
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