It’s been quite a year in Blighty, the blighted former east Atlantic fishery where regional GDP is Balkan, taxpayers subsidise corporate profit, and the fourth estate are third-rate fifth columnists. This is the first country to privatise its own water supply and impose economic sanctions upon itself.
If 2024 was the year of the Great Tory Reckoning, 2025 was the year Labour burned through political goodwill like it was crack. Their calculation that the electorate would prefer feigned racism to Reform’s real stuff hangs in everyone’s throat like pipe rash.
It’s been a wild 12 months. The year began with Keir Starmer accused by Elon Musk, the Adrian Mole of oligarchs, of complicity in the “rape of Britain.” Musk, who then was “first buddy” to an actual adjudicated rapist, was pondering whether to fund Reform UK. We found out that one of their MPs, like one of his Teslas, had been charged with battery.
In February, as a token of Sir Keir’s ambition to become the interlocutor between the States and Europe, lacquered friend of nonces Peter Mandelson was installed as UK ambassador to the US, perhaps because it was likely that he and President Trump might have shared interests.
We learned that when Jeffrey Epstein faced charges for soliciting sex from underage girls, Mandy had counselled “strategy strategy strategy” – guidance he’d clearly not shared with the prime minister, who then slashed the international aid budget to bring defence spending up to a Trump-friendly 2.5% of GDP. Nothing says “global Britain” like giving fewer vaccines to African children so you can park slightly larger boats in the South China Sea.
In March, hours after an extraordinary White House meeting in which JD Vance scolded Ukraine’s president for showing insufficient reverence towards America’s draft-dodging one, Volodymyr Zelensky was warmly welcomed to No 10, prompting JD to describe the UK as “some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 40 years.” This insult to the sons and daughters who died in Afghanistan and Iraq was mitigated by a leaked civil service memo which referred to Vance as “The Bikini Line” – on the grounds that his new ’tache represented a modest amount of bumfluff on a twat.
The month also saw Rachel Reeves declare war on bats and newts that were preventing construction of 1.5 million new homes before the next general election/collapse of the Gulf Stream, whichever arrives sooner. Cleansed of nature’s vetoes, Reeves hoped the country would at last achieve the frictionless landscape investors have long prayed for, where the only song at twilight is the gentle beep-beep-beep of reversing delivery vans.
April saw a big win in local elections – 677 out of 1,200 seats, 12 councils – for Nigel Farage’s merry band of sociopaths, inadequates and narcissists. One of the few consolations was the news that cases of impostor syndrome had been effectively eliminated by the elevation of Darren Grimes to deputy leader of Durham County Council. Much analysis was also devoted to the accelerating demise of the erstwhile horse-heating, tractor-wanking, “I’m trapped in a room with some bad people” natural stewards of power, the Conservative Party. Answer: Kemi Badenoch.
Then, with one hand on the levers of power, Reform promptly began to shit the bed. In June its chair Zia Yusuf quit for 48 hours after noticing the party was chronically Islamophobic, Warwickshire’s council leader resigned for “health reasons”, leaving an 18-year-old deputy in charge, convicted domestic abuser James McMurdock was suspended for something else, bleachy-toothed gust David Bull replaced Yusuf, who returned anyway, and splinter groups Advance UK and Restore Britain erupted like a pair of Farage’s gin-accelerated haemorrhoids.
Labour looked for new ways to alienate its base in July, when the party born of struggle proscribed Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation for waging asymmetric warfare on the military-industrial complex with Waitrose soup and Loctite.
Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper, unwavering supporters of Ukraine’s right to defend itself against a foreign aggressor, and Israel’s to defend itself against the humanitarian crisis it was busily authoring, had had enough. The systematic discharge of IDF sniper rounds into the skulls of Palestinian children queuing for “the most generous humanitarian aid” was one thing, but naive moralisers redecorating RAF Voyagers “Guilty Conscience Red” were an affront to the international rules-based order.
Suggested Reading
The year in pictures
August saw the round-up of thousands of sympathetic sign-waving pensioners. With the media otherwise preoccupied by whether or not gastronome Gregg Wallace had his trousers around his ankles while observing a female contestant filleting a hake, the coast was clear for the staunchest defenders of British values – Everlast-clad men in maintenance arrears – to commence Operation Raise the Colours.
This was an operation to arrest the decline of British culture by turning mini-roundabouts into Crusader shrines and hanging union flags upside down outside mosques. If ever there were a metaphor for the gulf between this country’s residual self-image and its lived reality, then aggrieved divorcees vandalising traffic furniture in the name of their inalienable right not to have a continuity announcer warn people about the name of Guy Gibson’s dog during The Dam Busters was surely it.
September arrived, and after six months of Trump and Mandelson struggling to place each other, the emergence of the latest tranche of Epstein correspondence revealed that Starmer’s top pick had referred to the sex-trafficker as “my best pal”. Unlike all the other widely available information, this was slavish support for a conveniently asphyxiated sex pest too far, and resulted in the confiscation of Mandy’s Ferrero Rocher. The UK then rolled out a Windsor Castle banquet and Red Arrows flypast for the second state visit of adjudicated sex pest Donald Trump.
Revelations of further lies from Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor coincided with the publication in October of Virginia Giuffre’s posthumous memoir, in which it was claimed she was forced to have sex with him on three occasions. Despite the prince’s claim never to have met her other than in photos, his elder brother moved decisively to strip him of his titles a mere 18 years after his friendship with the paedophile first became public.
In November, we learned that Boris Johnson’s response to Covid, which killed more people than the second world war blitz, had been “toxic, chaotic” and probably resulted in thousands of unnecessary deaths. The story didn’t really cut through, because Poppymas had begun.
Evolved from an earlier tradition in which widows with paper poppies and bereft mothers said ‘“never again”, this has become a month-long carnival of mawkishness in which postboxes are decked in Spitfire tea cosies and public figures who don’t wear poppies are publicly humiliated in tribute to veterans whose mental health was shattered in Goose Green.
Against this backdrop of hyperjingoism and fetishised conflict, Shabana Mahmood (Yvette Cooper’s replacement as home secretary in the reshuffle caused by Angela Rayner’s resignation for being too working class) upped the War On Refugees by announcing that Labour would make refugee status temporary, extend the wait for permanent settlement to 20 years, confiscate assets and check to see if children arriving on small boats were concealing things in their mouths. Do those last two proposals remind you of anything?
Things went from bad to worse for the BBC. Already threatened with a billion-dollar lawsuit from Trump for having the temerity to edit his rambling January 6, 2021 incitement into something coherent, the corporation was boycotted once more by Nigel Farage, who was upset that they’d latched on to a lengthy supply of stories about his behaviour at school – like mimicking the hiss of gas next to Jewish pupils, or turning up in the junior playground to tell nine-year-olds “that’s the way back to Africa.” The fact the last one is also Reform policy was of no consequence to a media preoccupied with gotchas over scrutiny.
Was there ever a greater opportunity or need for a progressive party? Step forward Your Party. Zara Sultana’s resignation from Labour blindsided Jeremy Corbyn into launching the new party against his own wishes. Following leaked WhatsApp messages that threatened mass walkouts, the launch and closure of a rogue membership portal after the other five male MPs told members to cancel any direct debits, Adnan Hussain quitting and Sultana boycotting their inaugural conference, the ensuing comic disbelief was the closest Albion had come to unity since Angela Rippon’s appearance in the 1976 Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special.
It’s hope that kills them. That and the 18-month waiting lists. Regardless, the Greens offered a glimmer in the shape of the straight-talking northerner, Zack Polanski, but the optimism was offset by the nagging sense that here is Hereward the Woke fighting a valiant yet rearguard action against an enemy that may already have prevailed.
December and it’s nearly Christmas. In the presence of flood, fire, and environmental collapse, expect to hear carol service readings from Genesis relating to UK permissions for tie-back oil/gas extraction in the North Sea.
In the nativity, meanwhile, the Holy Family will travel to Dover, where the shepherds wave “No Room At The Premier Inn” placards; the gold, frankincense and myrrh are confiscated to offset “administrative costs”; Joseph is separated for an age assessment interview; and a postpartum Mary misses a maternity appointment 40 miles from Yarl’s Wood, because SERCO are searching Jesus’s mouth for sim cards. Merry Christmas.
Henry Morris is the satirist behind The Secret Diary of a Tory MP. His Substack is Henry Morris’s World Exclusives
