CATHERINE O'HARA (1954 - 2026): A OBITUARY

Catherine O’Hara, who has taken her final bow at the age of 71, always seemed too vibrantly peculiar to succumb to something as mundane as mortality. Born in Toronto, she was the sixth of seven children in an Irish Catholic family, where chaos presumably prepared her for the absurdities of show business. Her sister, the musician Mary Margaret O’Hara, shared the gene for artistic eccentricity, but Catherine channelled hers into comedy with a precision that could skewer pretension without drawing blood. 

She cut her teeth at The Second City in Toronto in 1974, understudying Gilda Radner before joining the legendary SCTV troupe from 1976 to 1984. There, her impersonations and sketches earned her a Primetime Emmy for writing, proving she could craft laughs as deftly as deliver them. Hollywood beckoned with roles that amplified her off-kilter charm: the harried mother Kate McCallister in Home Alone (1990) and its sequel, frantically searching for a forgotten child amid holiday mayhem, a performance that resonated with every parent who’s ever misplaced a sock, let alone a son. 

In Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice (1988), she was Delia Deetz, the pretentious artist whose disdain for the afterlife was matched only by her questionable taste in sculpture—reprising the role in the 2024 sequel with undiminished flair. Her late-career triumph as Moira Rose in Schitt’s Creek (2015–2020) brought an Emmy for acting, a Golden Globe, and the joy of watching a faded soap star reinvent herself with wigs and vocabulary that defied gravity. Married to production designer Bo Welch in 1992, whom she met on the set of Beetlejuice, they raised two sons, Matthew and Luke, in a life that balanced Hollywood’s glare with quiet normalcy. She also lived with situs inversus, her organs mirrored—a fitting quirk for someone who turned expectations inside out. 

O’Hara leaves a legacy of laughter that poked gently at human folly, reminding us that eccentricity is the spice of sanity. In a world of cookie-cutter stars, she was the odd one out, and we were all the richer for it.

THE CURIOUS CASE OF AMELIA (OR: HOW THE BRITISH STATE INVENTED ITS OWN NEMESIS)

One might have thought that, in an age when governments are meant to be wary of the internet's capacity for mischief, the British Home Office—or one of its satellite bodies, Hull City Council being the usual suspect in these matters—would have paused before commissioning an educational video game designed to inoculate the young against the perils of 'far-right extremism.' But pause they did not. Instead, they produced Pathways: Navigating the Internet and Extremism, a digital morality play aimed at teenagers, in which the player, a blameless lad named Charlie, is tempted towards the dark side by a purple-haired goth girl called Amelia.

Amelia, you see, was intended as the villain of the piece: a choker-wearing, pink-dressed siren who whispers seductive heresies about borders, cultural compatibility, and the merits of low crime rates. Agree with her, and your score plummets; resist her blandishments, and you are rewarded with the warm glow of approved opinion. The designers, one imagines, patted themselves on the back for their subtlety. After all, who could possibly sympathise with a character so obviously coded as the embodiment of wrongthink? The purple hair alone was surely warning enough—practically a semaphore flag signalling "danger: unconventional views ahead."

Alas, the British public—ever possessed of a finely tuned sense of the absurd—took one look at Amelia and decided otherwise. Within days of the game's quiet release, she had been requisitioned by the very forces she was meant to repel. Memes proliferated with the speed usually reserved for royal scandals or unfortunate ministerial gaffes. Amelia appeared waving the Union Jack, delivering stirring monologues about the defence of Albion, or simply standing defiantly in the rain like a latter-day Boudicca with better hair dye. AI-generated videos had her addressing the nation in tones of measured outrage, while fan art transformed her into the waifu of the disaffected right. Merchandise suggestions followed: T-shirts, mugs, perhaps a limited-edition choker bearing the legend "Amelia Was Right."

The irony was exquisite. A project conceived in the spirit of Prevent—the government's counter-radicalisation programme, which has long specialised in treating ordinary scepticism about mass immigration as the moral equivalent of bomb-making—had accidentally created its own icon of resistance. Amelia, designed to embody everything the establishment feared, became instead a mirror held up to its own anxieties. The views she espoused in the game—concerns about cultural erosion, public safety, national identity—were not, as the designers evidently believed, the ravings of a tiny extremist fringe. They were, on the contrary, rather widely shared, which is why the attempt to pathologise them struck so many as both pompous and faintly comical.

The online response was not merely mockery; it was a masterclass in cultural jujitsu. Where the state offered a clunky interactive lecture, the internet replied with satire, beauty, and a certain defiant glamour. Amelia's aesthetic—goth confidence married to patriotic sentiment—proved irresistible in an era when official communications so often feel sterile and hectoring. One suspects the game's creators had never quite grasped that making your antagonist more charismatic than your protagonist is a rookie error in narrative craft, let alone in propaganda.

And then, inevitably, came the retreat. Faced with a viral phenomenon they could neither control nor comprehend, the authorities did what authorities so often do: they made the offending item disappear. The game was quietly taken offline, leaving behind only screenshots, archived memes, and the lingering suspicion that someone, somewhere in Whitehall, had just learned a very expensive lesson about the perils of underestimating the British sense of humour.

There is, of course, a longer tradition here. Governments have been trying to shape public opinion through art and entertainment since the days of Tudor propaganda plays, and they have been failing at it almost as long. What makes the Amelia affair peculiarly modern is the speed and scale of the counterattack. In the age of AI and instant memetic warfare, a state-sponsored cautionary tale can be inverted into a celebration of the forbidden within hours. The establishment, accustomed to setting the terms of debate, discovers too late that the internet has its own ideas.

One cannot help feeling a twinge of sympathy for the earnest civil servants who dreamed up Pathways. They meant well, after all—or at least they meant to be seen to mean well, which in bureaucratic circles amounts to much the same thing. Yet in their eagerness to warn the young against dangerous thoughts, they handed their opponents a gift: a ready-made martyr with excellent cheekbones and impeccable timing. Amelia may have been deleted from the official servers, but she lives on in the collective imagination, a purple-haired reminder that propaganda, like comedy, depends entirely on knowing your audience.

And on that score, the British state appears to have rather missed the joke.

THE DAVOS DEMOLITION DERBY

There was a time, not so long ago, when the World Economic Forum at Davos resembled nothing so much as a gathering of the world's most expensively dressed penguins, huddling together on an ice floe of mutual self-congratulation while lecturing the rest of us about the virtues of melting it. Private jets queued up like taxis at Heathrow, disgorging billionaires who had come to explain why the rest of us should own nothing and be happy about it. The air was thick with the perfume of hypocrisy: men who had made their fortunes by exploiting national differences now preached the gospel of borderless bliss, while simultaneously ensuring their own offspring attended schools where the curriculum still included such quaint notions as patriotism and arithmetic.

And then, on a crisp January day in 2026, Donald J Trump strolled into this sanctum sanctorum and, with the breezy confidence of a man who has never read a Klaus Schwab white paper in his life (and why would he?), proceeded to administer the verbal equivalent of a wedgie to the entire assembly. He did not mince words. He did not offer the customary Davos platitudes about "stakeholder capitalism" or "inclusive growth." Instead, he reminded Europe that replacing its native populations with unchecked migration might not be the cleverest long-term strategy, suggested that Canada owed its continued existence to American forbearance, and floated the idea—yet again—that Greenland might look rather fetching in stars and stripes. 

The globalists, accustomed to being addressed in the soothing tones of management consultancy, sat there like debutantes who had just been informed that the orchestra had switched to punk rock. One could almost hear the collective intake of breath, followed by the faint clinking of champagne flutes being set down in disbelief. Here was a man who had wandered into their coven and, instead of genuflecting before the altar of global governance, had essentially told them to shove their dystopian blueprint where the sun does not shine. It was magnificent, in its way—raw, unfiltered, and entirely devoid of the polished euphemisms that usually pass for courage in such circles.

But let us not make the mistake of attributing this glorious moment of deflation to Trump alone. He is, after all, merely the messenger—or, more accurately, the megaphone. The true architects of globalism's current discomfiture are not to be found in the gilded halls of power but in the factories of Ohio, the oil fields of Texas, the construction sites of Pennsylvania: the blue-collar working class who, with the quiet determination of people who have nothing left to lose except their illusions, decided that enough was enough. Globalism, that glittering intellectual construct, was always a top-down affair. It was devised by people who fly first class and think "diversity" means hiring another Harvard graduate from a slightly different postcode. It promised a world without borders, where capital and labour would flow freely, and everyone would benefit from the efficiencies of scale. What it delivered, of course, was a world in which capital flowed freely to tax havens, labour flowed freely across borders to depress wages, and the only people who truly benefited were those who already owned the airports.

The working class noticed this rather sooner than the commentariat. They noticed when their factories closed and reopened in countries where environmental regulations were treated as optional. They noticed when their communities, once cohesive if unpretentious, began to fracture under the pressure of rapid demographic change imposed from above. They noticed when politicians who had never changed a spark plug in their lives explained that their anxieties were merely the unfortunate but necessary birth pangs of a new global order. And, being practical people, they did what practical people do: they voted. Not for the polished technocrat who offered more of the same, but for the brash outsider who at least acknowledged their existence. 

Trump did not create this revolt; he surfed it. The wave was generated by millions of ordinary men and women who had grown tired of being told that their desire to preserve their culture, their wages, and their children's future was somehow evidence of moral failure. Globalism, for all its lofty rhetoric, had always rested on the assumption that the working class would simply accept its own obsolescence. 

It turned out to be a fatal miscalculation. The very people whom globalism claimed to be lifting out of poverty were the ones who finally pulled the plug on the entire enterprise. Not through violence or revolution, but through the humblest of democratic acts: marking an X on a ballot paper. The elites, who had spent decades explaining that nationalism was a primitive relic, discovered to their horror that it was alive and well in the hearts of people who still believed that a nation should belong to its citizens.

And now, with globalism's balloon comprehensively pricked, one cannot help but cast an eye across the Atlantic to our own benighted isle. Britain, having half-escaped the European Union only to find itself governed by a succession of leaders who seemed determined to reimport the worst aspects of continental technocracy, stands at a similar crossroads. The same forces that propelled Trump into power—the quiet anger of the disregarded, the sense that the country one grew up in is slipping away—are stirring here too.

Enter Nigel Farage, that perennial thorn in the establishment's side, who has spent decades being dismissed as a fringe figure only to watch his once-marginal concerns become the common currency of political debate. One detects, in the current climate, the faint but unmistakable rumble of another popular revolt. The British working class—those legendary figures who once built an empire and then, with characteristic phlegmatism, allowed it to dissolve—may yet decide that they have had quite enough of being lectured by people who cannot distinguish between a nation and a hotel chain. If they do, and if Farage becomes the vessel for their frustrations as Trump did across the water, then globalism's downfall will acquire a satisfying symmetry. The ideology that promised to transcend nations will have been defeated, in the end, by the stubborn persistence of national feeling among the very people it claimed to have rendered obsolete.

There is, of course, no guarantee. The British establishment has a genius for absorbing dissent and neutralising it with committee seats and peerages. But the signs are there: the growing disillusionment with both major parties, the sense that the country's borders, culture, and economy are no longer under meaningful democratic control. Should the working class here follow their American cousins and deliver a similar rebuke to the cosmopolitan elite, it would constitute the final, exquisite proof that globalism's greatest flaw was not economic but anthropological: it fundamentally misunderstood the nature of human loyalty.

In the meantime, one can only raise a glass—preferably one filled with something domestically produced—to the blue-collar voters who have reminded the world that history is not made solely in the conference centres of Davos, but in the polling stations of the forgotten provinces. Globalism, that most hubristic of modern projects, is not yet dead, but it is certainly reeling. And for that, we have not one man to thank, but millions of ordinary ones who refused to own nothing and be happy about it.