'The five families'
Stop trying to make the five families happen! Wisely getting ahead of unjustified smears like "pompous backbench rabble" and "self-important layabouts marking time until their inevitable defenestration in 2024", the overlapping quintet of interest groups on the right wing of the Conservative party have started referring to themselves by this moniker, drawn with hilarious grandiosity from the history of the New York mafia.
To be fair, the mob were also fairly unpopular with the general public and ultimately collapsed in an orgy of mutual recrimination, but the more accurate analogy seems to be 90s footballer Paul Ince, who, it's said, insisted on being called The Guv'nor to the bemusement of his teammates and had it on a personalised numberplate. The capo di tutti capi is the ERG's Mark Francois, who claimed humbly that it was how "you in the media are now referring to us" … but who obviously has John Gotti as his WhatsApp profile picture.
The five families, you will remember, also appointed a "star chamber" of MPs with legal experience to formulate their view of the government's most recent Rwanda legislation. The actual star chamber: a vastly powerful 16th-century court that enforced the will of the king by arbitrarily cutting people's ears off, rather than a group of Eurosceptic lawyers with a grudge against Rishi Sunak for trying to save them from oblivion.
Harry, dragon slayer
Look, if I absolutely have to choose between the Duke of Sussex and his various columnist persecutors, I know whose side I'm on. But Christ, he doesn't make it easy, does he? "I've been told that slaying dragons will get you burned," he said, via his lawyer, after his court victory over Mirror Group newspapers. "It is a worthwhile price to pay. The mission continues." Presumably his speechwriter has a side gig punching up Fast and the Furious scripts.
The phrase 'X (formerly Twitter)'
And everything thereon. Possibly less annoying if you don't have to type it all the time.
The kisses at the end of Laurence Fox's DMs to Dan Wootton on X (formerly Twitter)
"So much fun. Xx." VOMIT EMOJI.
The rise of the Dadcast
And you thought you'd had enough of true crime. This year, the charts have been dominated by a rapidly spawning genre of chats between very sensible fellas: Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell, Ed Balls and George Osborne, Jake Humphrey and someone with the X (formerly Twitter) handle @liquidthinker. You or your father absolutely love at least one of them, and are hoping for a six-part Seb Coe/Greg Rutherford deep dive on the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony.
Foreign secretarial hysteria
David Cameron was prime minister. Now – get this – he is foreign secretary. And he is a lord. The ghost of Edward Heath is on bass.
'That's a really good question' and other interview tricks
Not really a novelty for '23, but persistent enough to have driven quite a lot of you absolutely wild. Reader Graham Stevens rightly points out that flattering a broadcast journalist about the quality of their query is a fine way to buy a little time (and, I might add, soften them up a bit: a minor celebrity once said he loved an article I'd written two years previously about escalators, a trick somewhat undermined by the printout in front of him with my name highlighted by some PR flunky – but still made me wish him the very best).
Janet Bick wishes politicians would stop adding the line that things are world-beating "to many and varied statements about things which aren't". Pat Taylor has had enough of hearing about "the British people". Brendan Rooney has no truck with the placeholder "well, look". Karen Drury is absolutely done with MPs saying "I've been clear", when in fact "the person speaking has changed their stance daily for the past two weeks". I share your dismay, folks, and I'm sure it'll stop now we've mentioned it.
Ming vase analogies
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