A man walks past the Christmas billboard in Kingston upon Thames, 19 November 2025 (Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty)
Above Côte Brasserie in Kingston upon Thames, overlooking its Riverside Walk, there was for a week in mid-November a very long billboard depicting crowds in sackcloth and red hats trimmed in white, wading across water towards us. Yuletide synapses fired first: here was a Victorian Christmas card rerun of a Renaissance nativity painting, snow-covered fields in the distance, past-times rural types massed up front. Happy shopping!
Except: that was a really big crowd. And a lot of stables. Look closer, and the smiles were smudged and strange, more feral than festive. When the website thispersondoesnotexist.com was launched in 2019, it conjured plausibly personable imitations of human features – until your focus shifted towards their nightmarish ears, their indescribable headgear, their occasional meat-botch companions. Imagine a whole army of them wading ashore at you through the snowmelt, writhing fused limbs and non-Euclidean torsos, every zoomed-in detail a hideous AI patchwork. The chicken-dogs were even worse. If this was Renaissance art, it was Bruegel’s Peasant Wedding and Triumph of Death commingled as glitchcore Bosch.
England doesn’t know how to say: ‘No Kings.’ Instead, it says: ‘Not this one, but perhaps his brother or his son.’ All Windsor crises, from the Abdication through Diana to this Andrew disaster, have been about personal morality – ironically revealing how much faith remains in the monarch as an ethical role model. But it isn’t the monarchs who are the British problem. It’s monarchism: the archaic top-down power structure of the Anglo-British state. In 1689, absolutism was stripped from the crown and transferred to Parliament, which today means the cabinet. The principle of parliamentary sovereignty is monarchism thinly disguised: government by supreme authority, with certain liberties allowed to trickle downwards.
In The Impact of Labour, Maurice Cowling wrote that politics in the 1920s was ‘fifty or sixty people’ in tension with one another. The Battle of Ideas, which packed out Church House for a weekend in October, is like that but for political contrarians: everyone who is anyone in British counter-suggestibility is here, and they all know each other.
The US can bomb Venezuelan military and civilian targets from the USS Gerald R. Ford but it’s difficult to imagine anyone signing off on a ground invasion. Cooler heads in the US military may be wary of a quagmire. If they did invade, US troops would probably end up fighting not only the Venezuelan military, intelligence services and civilian militias but also the Colombian guerrillas that operate along the border.
Qesser Zuhrah, Amu Gib, Heba Muraisi, Jon Cink, T Hoxha and Kamran Ahmed are on hunger strike. All are on remand in British jails awaiting trial for alleged actions either at Elbit Systems UK’s Filton research hub in August 2024, or, in June 2025, at RAF Brize Norton, from where flights depart regularly to RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, which is used for British surveillance flights over Gaza and military operations across the Middle East.
The killing of Palestinians has continued, sometimes surpassing pre-ceasefire levels and accelerating viciously in the West Bank, where armed settlers, backed by the army, strut freely into Palestinian homes and gardens. New ‘seam zones’ are declared, new checkpoints and gates are set up, and there are Israeli raids on villages, universities and religious sites, all while President Trump tells us ‘the war is over.’
In the first week of November I was sitting with my mother in the tent in al-Mawasi in southern Gaza. ‘We can’t stay here through the winter,’ she said. ‘Our tents are worn out.’