CHRISTMAS, CORRECTED

There are moments in the British calendar when the national mood reveals itself more clearly than any general election. One of them arrives each November, when John Lewis unveils its Christmas advertisement. The ritual has become a kind of secular sacrament: the soft lighting, the swelling strings or, these days, the carefully curated cover version, the obligatory lump in the throat. This year’s effort, starring Dame Kristin Scott Thomas as a glamorous grandmother determined to transform her study into a glittering “Gran Cave” for her young charges, has already provoked the familiar chorus of approval from those who measure moral progress by the careful arrangement of faces on screen. Yet the response from other quarters has been rather less reverent. One particularly blunt observer noted that the old white granny appears to be ushering in her own demographic sunset, surrounded by children who look nothing like her, a Black husband figure hovering in the doorway, and not a traditional Christmas symbol in sight. The observation was crude, certainly. It was also, in its unvarnished way, difficult to dismiss entirely.

What strikes the careful viewer is not so much the presence of diversity as the studied absence of anything that might once have been called ordinary. The grandmother, elegant and faintly isolated, is granted a brief burst of manufactured joy among disco balls and tinsel streamers. Empathy, that quality John Lewis once traded in with almost embarrassing fluency, feels curiously rationed. The children’s delight is real enough on camera, but the emotional architecture supporting it feels assembled according to a checklist rather than observed from life. There is little sense of shared history, of habits passed down, of the quiet continuities that make family feel like family rather than a carefully balanced casting call. The ad congratulates itself on rediscovering the joy of giving, yet the gift it offers the audience is primarily ideological: a vision of Britain in which the old order is gently, tastefully, and irrevocably superseded.

Compare this with the reception accorded last year’s film. In 2025 John Lewis dared something almost radical in the current climate: it told a story about a father and his teenage son. A white father and a white son, as it happened, though that detail was scarcely remarked upon at the time because it seemed, for once, beside the point. The boy, awkward and headphone-clad, finds a way to speak to his father through a vinyl record of a 1990s club anthem. The father is transported back to his own youth on the dancefloor, then forward again through memories of his son as a baby and toddler, until the two of them share a slightly embarrassed, thoroughly British hug. The response was striking. Grown men admitted to weeping. Commentators spoke of masculinity, of the difficulty men have finding words, of the quiet power of a gift that says what conversation cannot. The creators themselves expressed astonishment at the warmth of the reaction. For a few weeks it felt as if a department store had accidentally produced something that looked like life rather than a seminar.

One suspects that particular experiment will not be repeated. A healthy, single-race father-son relationship, depicted without apology or corrective casting, turns out to be the sort of thing that can be indulged only once, and then only if the surrounding commentary is careful to frame it as a response to some approved cultural anxiety. The message, as currently understood in the circles that matter, requires constant visual reinforcement that the old patterns are ending. Continuity is suspect. Familiarity is exclusionary. Empathy must be redistributed according to demographic need. Last year’s ad risked suggesting that ordinary human bonds between men of the same background might still possess value. This year’s corrects the oversight with a grandmother whose primary emotional function appears to be facilitating her own cultural replacement while the camera lingers approvingly on the new arrangement.

Waitrose, meanwhile, has had the good sense to remember that Christmas advertising works best when it refuses to take itself entirely seriously. Their six-minute sequel reunites Keira Knightley with Joe Wilkinson’s endearingly shambolic Phil for a full-blown romcom of broken engagements, rival suitors and a Beef Wellington deployed as a romantic savoury exocet missile. The pair’s eventual kitchen reconciliation feels earned rather than prescribed; one detects actual affection between the performers, and a willingness to let the joke land without first consulting a sensitivity reader. It is longer than it needs to be, of course, but the excess is generous rather than preachy.

Marks & Spencer has gone further still in recovering the lost art of festive entertainment. James Norton, temporarily divested of both beard and shirt, plays an undercover Santa who slips the North Pole to sample ordinary Christmas for himself, guided by Lucy Punch’s sharp-tongued Mrs Claus. The film moves through food, fashion and domestic clutter with a light step, discovering that the real magic resides in shared meals and small rituals rather than in any grand ideological statement. There is warmth here, and a sly recognition that most people would rather watch a handsome actor (one indeed wonders if it was a secret Bond audition for Norton) pretend to be Father Christmas than sit through another sermon on the necessity of cultural replacement. The M&S advert feels almost indecently human: it invites the viewer to smile rather than to improve.

And then there is Aldi, which continues to understand that the British public will forgive almost anything so long as an anthropomorphised carrot is involved. Kevin and his daughter Chantenay set off through the snow in search of their missing Cauli Dog, only to find the creature peacefully asleep inside a Christmas cracker. The whole thing is pure, unapologetic whimsy—lost posters, mistaken bears, a child’s simple wish fulfilled. The emotion is straightforward, the humour gentle, and the resolution satisfying in the way that only a well-timed reunion of vegetable and floret can be: it assumes that audiences still possess hearts, and that those hearts prefer stories to statements.

Going back to John Lewis, the sardonic beauty of the exercise is that it is conducted with such exquisite good taste. No one raises a voice. The lighting remains soft. Kristin Scott Thomas brings her usual quiet authority. The soundtrack is tasteful. And yet the underlying proposition is stark: certain forms of belonging are no longer to be celebrated without accompanying penance. The 2025 film was allowed its moment of uncomplicated recognition because the culture still retained a residual appetite for it. The 2026 version makes clear that such appetites will henceforth be managed. 

John Lewis, once the reliable supplier of national sentimentality, has absorbed the lesson. It will not be allowed to do something like that again. The message, after all, must be protected from the dangerous possibility that people might prefer stories that feel like their own.

AN UN-COOPERATIVE PERPETRATOR

There are moments in public life when the universe, with its customary lack of consideration for political convenience, simply refuses to cooperate. The recent unpleasantness in Kraków’s main square was one such moment. A young man, having first disposed of his own family with a thoroughness that suggested personal rather than ideological motive, proceeded to the historic centre of the city and opened fire upon strangers. Six people died; more than a dozen others were injured. The event was tragic, random, and—in the particular way that modern atrocities often are—immediately annexed by politicians who had been waiting for precisely this sort of opportunity.

Donald Tusk, never one to let a crisis go to waste, moved with the speed of a man who has already decided the moral of the story before the blood has dried. The perpetrator, we were informed with impressive certainty, was an ultranationalist, a far-right extremist, a man whose radical views placed him in uncomfortable proximity to those awkward patriotic and conservative forces currently making life difficult for Tusk's pals in Brussels. The narrative was neat, serviceable, and almost elegant in its simplicity. It required only one small adjustment: the disappearance of the shooter’s Facebook page.

According to reports that have the ring of the plausible, the order went out to erase the account at once. One understands the urgency. Social media, for all its vulgarity, has an inconvenient habit of preserving the self-portrait a man draws of himself when he believes no one important is watching. In this case the portrait was not of a stern Polish traditionalist burning with resentment against Brussels, Berlin, or the European Commission. It was something rather more ambiguous.

The page, before its abrupt deletion, presented a young man given to certain theatrical flourishes. There were rainbow flags. There was an aesthetic of sexual indeterminacy that would not have looked out of place in a graduate seminar on fluid identities. There were references—confirmed by those who had known him—to the pleasures of costume and painted nails. And, most deliciously of all for those who still retain some sense of Polish cultural memory, there was open mockery of Pope John Paul II, the sainted figure whose image still hangs in half the kitchens of the country and whose moral authority remains, for many, non-negotiable. It is difficult to imagine a more efficient way of disqualifying oneself from the ranks of the Polish far right. One might as well apply for membership of the Communist Party while wearing a Solidarity badge and a yarmulke.

The difficulty for Tusk is obvious; the preferred story required a clean ideological villain—preferably one who could be linked, however tenuously, to the conservative opposition led by President Karol Nawrocki and those tiresome patriots who continue to resist what they rather dramatically call the government’s soft coup, assisted by the European Commission and the German government. Instead they were presented with a young man whose digital remains suggested a different set of cultural affiliations altogether. The Facebook page did not merely fail to support the narrative; it actively sabotaged it. Deletion, under the circumstances, must have seemed the only civilised response.

One has seen this sort of thing before, of course. Politicians of a certain progressive temperament have long treated inconvenient biographical details the way a fastidious housekeeper treats a stain on the carpet: better to remove the evidence than to explain it. Tusk, in this regard, is merely following a well-trodden path. His Spanish counterpart Pedro Sánchez has elevated the practice to something approaching an art form, and both men enjoy the protective umbrella of Ursula von der Leyen’s Brussels, an institution that has never been overly troubled by the gap between proclaimed principle and operational necessity. The technique is simple: assert the preferred interpretation early and loudly, then ensure that contradictory material vanishes before too many people have time to notice.

What makes the Kraków case particularly rich in sardonic possibility is the sheer mismatch between the crime and the costume the authorities wished the criminal to wear. Killing one’s own family and then spraying bullets into a crowded square is the act of a profoundly disturbed individual. It is not, however, the characteristic gesture of the Polish ultranationalist, a type who, whatever his other failings, tends to revere the family, the nation, and the late Pope with equal fervour. The Facebook evidence suggested someone more at home in the overlapping worlds of performative identity and private fantasy than in the stern barracks of the radical right. To insist otherwise required either heroic self-deception or a readiness to delete the evidence. The government, it appears, chose the latter.

There is a larger comedy here, and not a particularly subtle one. Europe’s political class has spent years constructing an elaborate taxonomy of threats in which the far right occupies the central place of honour. Every act of violence must, if possible, be fitted into that taxonomy. When the facts refuse to cooperate, the facts are adjusted. The result is a kind of ideological taxidermy: the specimen is stuffed, mounted, and labelled according to the requirements of the display case, regardless of what the creature actually looked like when it was alive. In Kraków the taxidermists were simply a little too hasty. They ordered the removal of the only photograph that showed the creature in its natural habitat.

One need not romanticise the opposition to see the absurdity. The conservative and patriotic forces in Poland may be as imperfect as any other political tribe. But to suggest that a young man who ridiculed John Paul II and flew the rainbow flag was somehow their spiritual representative is to stretch credulity beyond the point where it snaps and begins to laugh. The laughter, in this case, is not particularly kind. It is the dry, slightly weary amusement of someone who has watched the same performance too many times: the rush to judgment, the selective presentation of evidence, the quiet disappearance of anything that complicates the script.

In the end the dead remain dead, the wounded remain wounded, and the political class continues its endless struggle to make reality conform to theory. The Facebook page is gone, or so we are told. Yet the absurdity it revealed lingers, like the faint smell of nail varnish in a room that was supposed to smell of gun oil and nationalist fervour. One almost feels a certain sympathy for the propagandists. It is hard work, after all, trying to force the universe to take sides. The universe, as usual, declines the invitation.

PIETY, PROSECUTION AND PERFECT TIMING

The sudden eruption of piety in the life of Russell Brand has provided the rest of us with a spectacle of such exquisite timing that one almost suspects divine intervention, if only of the theatrical variety. Until quite recently, Brand was content to inhabit the role of the professional reprobate: a man whose public persona consisted largely of the enthusiastic pursuit of substances, sexual variety and the kind of verbal excess that suggested he had never met a boundary he did not wish to test. The authorities, the media and a good portion of the public appeared content to treat this as a form of performance art, or at least as the inevitable cost of celebrity. 

Decades of this behaviour produced little more than the occasional raised eyebrow and a shelf of confessional volumes. Then, somewhere around 2024, Brand discovered Christ. The conversion was announced with the same exuberance once reserved for less spiritual enthusiasms. Baptism followed. Public declarations of faith multiplied. A certain portion of the internet, previously indifferent or amused, began to listen with something approaching respect.

And then the law arrived.

The conviction, delivered on the fifth of November 2026 at Southwark Crown Court, concerned events that had occurred between 2004 and 2009. One count of rape and three of sexual assault. The jury, after due deliberation, found against him on those matters while clearing him of others. A substantial custodial sentence now looms. The timing, of course, is everything. Lauren Witzke, surveying the wreckage from her own particular vantage point, has concluded that the real offence was not the historical conduct but the subsequent spiritual reorientation. Had Brand remained a cheerfully degenerate celebrity, she suggests, the machinery of justice would have continued to sleep. It was only when he became effective, charismatic and, worse still, beloved by a different constituency that the decision was taken to make an example of him. The top article covering the verdict even managed to mock the faith itself, which she finds deeply disturbing. She hopes the Trump Administration might intervene, a plea that rather neatly reveals the geopolitical scale on which some people now view a British criminal trial.

One must, of course, question the motives of everyone involved, beginning with Brand himself. Conversion is always a mysterious business, and when it arrives after a career spent demonstrating the opposite values, the sceptic is entitled to ask whether the road to Damascus ran through a particularly unfavourable set of headlines. Genuine spiritual awakening is possible; so is the calculation that a public embrace of Christianity might purchase a measure of forgiveness, or at least a new audience. Brand has been both things at different times: the man who made a brand of his own excesses, and the man now presenting himself as redeemed. The two positions are not necessarily incompatible, but they do invite the suspicion that the second may have been influenced by the impending difficulties of the first.

The prosecutors and the complainants occupy a different moral territory. The allegations concerned events long past. Delayed justice is still justice, and the fact that the complainant’s stories finally reached a courtroom after Brand’s religious turn does not, by itself, prove conspiracy. Yet the coincidence is inconvenient for those who prefer their narratives tidy. One can believe the women without believing that the timing of the trial was entirely free of cultural weather. The climate had changed. Brand was no longer merely a louche entertainer; he had become a figure who spoke, with increasing confidence, to audiences suspicious of institutions. That alteration in status does not invent the past, but it may have accelerated the willingness of institutions to revisit it.

Then there is the media, which has never been accused of excessive subtlety when a fallen celebrity is available. The article that so offended Witzke managed to describe Brand as a “born-again Christian rapist” with a flourish of sanctimony that would have made a Victorian moralist blush. The phrase does useful work: it simultaneously registers the conviction and sneers at the faith. One is left wondering whether the contempt is directed more at the crime or at the inconvenient fact that the criminal now claims to have found God. Journalists who spent years treating Brand’s earlier excesses as colourful copy now discover a sudden appetite for moral seriousness. The appetite is selective. Motives, once again, are not pure.

Witzke’s own intervention is not free of interest. Her analysis is clear: the real sin was effectiveness in the service of Christ. The claim has the advantage of simplicity. It also has the disadvantage of treating the historical allegations as secondary, almost incidental. To defend Brand on the ground that he was left alone while degenerate and pursued only once he became pious is to imply that the earlier conduct was somehow less serious when it was merely entertaining. That is a difficult position to sustain without appearing to grade the seriousness of the offences according to the political or religious utility of the offender. One suspects that if Brand had converted to a less fashionable creed, or to none at all, the same events might have produced a different set of defenders.

The public, meanwhile, divides along familiar lines. Some see a predator finally held to account. Others see a man punished for the crime of becoming useful to the wrong side. Both camps contain people whose motives are mixed. There are those who care about the victims and those who care about the narrative. There are those who care about due process and those who care about the opportunity to score points. The Brand case has the misfortune of occurring at a moment when almost every public event is immediately conscripted into larger culture-war formations. A British jury’s verdict becomes, within hours, evidence of either institutional capture or righteous reckoning, depending on the observer’s prior commitments.

What remains is the awkward residue of fact. Brand was found guilty of serious offences committed long before any conversion. The conversion itself may be sincere, opportunistic, or some combination of the two; the human heart is not obliged to choose only one. The media’s tone has been, in places, unpleasantly triumphant. The political suggestions that a foreign administration might usefully intervene in a domestic criminal matter are, at best, optimistic. And the claim that Brand would have been left undisturbed had he continued in his earlier mode of life is an assertion that cannot be tested, only asserted.

One further suspicion attaches itself, with a certain inevitable persistence, to the content of Brand’s YouTube channel. There, for some years, he has been in the business of inviting his substantial audience to treat the prevailing political narrative with something less than automatic reverence. The invitation has not gone unnoticed. It is therefore tempting, for those already disposed to see patterns rather than coincidences, to conclude that the historical allegations were revived and prosecuted with unusual energy precisely because a dissenting voice of that reach had become inconvenient. 

The channel, in this reading, was not merely a platform; it was a nuisance that required removal, and the courtroom provided the most efficient method. Whether the prosecutors, the complainants or the broader institutional apparatus ever sat down and articulated the matter in quite those terms is another question. Motives of this kind rarely announce themselves so clearly. Yet the suspicion lingers, as suspicions of this sort tend to do, that the timing of justice may have been assisted by the sudden usefulness of silencing a man who had taken to asking awkward questions in public.

In the end, the affair offers less a clean moral lesson than a demonstration of how quickly motives become contested once a public figure changes tribes. Brand’s earlier life supplied ample material for those who wished to see him as a cautionary tale of excess. His later life supplies material for those who wish to see him as a martyr to faith. Both interpretations require a certain selective blindness. The courts, for their part, have delivered a verdict according to the evidence presented. Whether that verdict will satisfy anyone for long is another matter. 

In the meantime, the rest of us are left to watch a man who once specialised in the performance of liberation now performing the consequences of having been taken at his word, while various observers quarrel over which version of him was the more authentic, and which set of motives, finally, deserves the greater suspicion.