Inside politics
Henry Nicholls/AFP/Getty
Nigel Farage: our most European politician
There’s a strange irony to Nigel Farage, a man who wears Union Jack socks and made his career fighting the EU, says Bagehot in The Economist. “He is probably Britain’s most European politician.” The Reform UK leader often talks of his “love” for the continent, hailing its “social, economic, political, cultural diversity”. He met his German second wife while gallivanting around Europe as a metals trader – often for French banks – and now has a French partner and a private life as complicated as it is fiercely guarded. “How European.” During his MEP years the “bibulous” Mr Farage found a natural home in Brussels, where there is “still plenty of opportunity for lunch”.
Politically, too, he is more European than people think. His vision of Europe – mainly churches and battlefields – may jar with more cosmopolitan views. But it tallies with a region long-dominated by Christian Democratic parties and where the wartime traumas of the 20th century remain its “moral bedrock”. On Russia, Farage’s views are dovish by British standards but well within the mainstream in, say, Italy. On healthcare, he is one of few UK politicians to acknowledge that the NHS is “lousy” compared with its European equivalents. This “peculiar Europeanness” stems not from an ignorance of Europe but from a deep understanding of it. He has “worked, lived and loved” across a continent that most Britons know only from their summer holidays. And unlike David Cameron types, who blithely assumed EU membership was just “a swap of a bit of sovereignty for extra GDP”, he recognised it as a far more profound shift. “Farage helped make Britain leave the EU. But Europe will never leave him.”
🥊🇩🇪 The Reform leader’s claim of being descended from 17th-century Huguenot refugees is “probably made up”, but he does have European ancestry. His great-great-grandparents on his father’s side, Nicholas and Bena Schrod, moved to London from Frankfurt in the 1860s. In 1870, when Nicholas overheard a man beneath his window telling his friend that “40 Englishmen could beat 80 Germans” in a battle, he “stormed downstairs and assaulted them”.
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Property
THE PERFECT COTTAGE Chantry Cottage, a Grade II-listed, 14th-century Cotswolds house ringed with a dry stone wall and festooned with hopelessly romantic creepers is known to estate agents as the “Holy Grail”, says Country Life. Downstairs are two comfy sitting rooms, one with a wood-burner, along with a modern kitchen, a dining room, a loo and one of the three bedrooms. Upstairs is another sitting room and two bedrooms, one en-suite. Outside is about a third of an acre of secluded, lovingly overgrown gardens. Cirencester is a 15-minute drive. £1.7m. Click on the image to see the listing.
Heroes and villains
UBC Television Uganda
Hero
Michel Kuka Mboladinga, a supporter of the Democratic Republic of Congo football team, who has become a sensation at the Africa Cup of Nations for standing stock still with a raised hand for the entirety of his team’s matches. The frozen fan has performed the feat – a tribute to the country’s independence hero Patrice Lumumba – in all three of Congo’s games, one of which lasted a whopping 115 minutes.
Villain
Michael Gove, according to Michael Gove, who says he now regrets his dramatic decision to withdraw support for Boris Johnson just as he was about to launch his 2016 Conservative leadership bid. The Tory peer told the Electoral Dysfunction podcast he should have kept his “profound worries” about Johnson to himself because their falling out led to the contest being won by Remain supporter Theresa May, who didn’t implement the Leave campaign’s plan for Brexit.
A clip of actor Austin Butler not quite dancing at a gig, which went viral last summer
Villains
Mobile phones, which are making people more reluctant to dance at gigs. Artists including Grammy-winning DJ Kaytranada and the American rapper Tyler, the Creator have complained that concertgoers are so scared of their shonky dance moves being filmed and going viral on social media that they’re standing still instead. Whereas the old rule used to be “dance like nobody’s watching”, choreographer and Brown University professor Sydney Skybetter tells The Wall Street Journal, nowadays it’s: “dance like anybody could be watching and that footage will follow you forever”.
Heroes
Beer drinkers taking part in a global competition to answer a seemingly unanswerable question: how long would it take to get through one million beers? Londoner Charlie Cooke created a “One Million Beers Please” WhatsApp group 14 months ago, inviting his friends to post a picture of each brewski they drank. Hundreds of others joined, and the OMBP group has now collectively sunk more than 105,000 cold ones and prompted the creation of several rival one-million-beer group chats. Take that, Dry January.
Villain
AI, for inadvertently tricking people into gathering in Birmingham city centre for a non-existent New Year’s Eve fireworks display for the second year running. Many of the online articles rounding up the “best” fireworks shows in the UK appear to have been written by AI and based on out-of-date information, and hundreds of revellers either ignored or didn’t see warnings by the police that no official events were planned.
Life
Reardon (L) with Jemima Khan in 2001. Dave Benett/Getty
My fabulous life as a fashion editor
When I bagged a job as a fashion assistant at American Vogue in 1987, says Kate Reardon in The Times, “it was a heady time”. I attended photoshoots with helicopters, speedboats and supercars, and was introduced to sushi by the Baldwin brothers, who encouraged me to “start gently with a California roll”. After returning to London aged 21 as Tatler’s fashion editor, I expensed lunch at Caviar Kaspia twice a week and at Le Caprice and San Lorenzo the other three days. I spent half my working hours calling in designer outfits to wear to parties that night and flew around the world to sit on little gold chairs at fashion shows.
The parties, as you’d expect, were wild. There was a pyjama-themed event in the Savoy ballroom; a toga party (oddly crashed by the South African rugby team); the Cannes Film Festival celebration at the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc, where Barry Diller’s 305ft, three-masted superyacht always took pride of place. My colleagues included Claudia Winkleman, who briefly served as my “spectacularly bad” PA, and the longtime Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, who, when I took him to David and Samantha Cameron’s for a kitchen supper, declared the PM-to-be a “decent chef”. And there were plenty of mishaps. I once forgot to bring the models’ shoes to a photoshoot, so every shot had to be cropped at the knee. For one Buckingham Palace do I wore a Roland Mouret dress with a zip all the way down the back, which, in the middle of the room, almost entirely gave way, “exposing a great deal of flesh and only the skimpiest of G-strings”. Every day was like something out of The Devil Wears Prada. And “I adored it”.
The Knowledge Crossword
Food and drink
The New York Times
If you’re in need of culinary inspiration for the year ahead, The New York Times cooking section published more than 1,000 new recipes in 2025. The most popular among readers include an astonishingly effective method for crisping up chicken thighs, with a speedy, tangy pan sauce; chicken tacos so easy you’ll never search for another method; a 45-minute porcini ragu that tastes like it’s been simmering for hours; a classic, cosy cottage pie; a spicy, creamy weeknight bolognese with a secret ingredient (Thai red curry paste); deeply rich, salty-sweet hoisin garlic noodles; and a spectacular 25-minute smashed beef kebab with cucumber yoghurt. To tuck in, simply click here.
Weather
Quoted
“I want to live my life, not record it.”
Jackie Kennedy
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