The 25 Worst Columns of 2025, Part One: Advent Calendars, Monarchist Fan Fiction, and Dead Twitter
Let's celebrate the most wonderful time of the year with a bonfire of bad takes...
In 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024, I pulled together the worst columns of the year. Now we’ve reached year five of the chart rundown. With an extra entry in the list, I’m acting like a greedy Hollywood studio and putting out five parts. They’ll be spread out across the rest of the month, with the final set of ‘winners’ revealed on New Year’s Eve. So, without further ado, please ‘enjoy’ our annual advent calendar of awfulness…
25. William Sitwell (🆕 entry)
’There’s a word missing from this festive ‘countdown calendar’. Can you guess what it is?’
20 November 2025, The Daily Telegraph
… and on the subject of advent calendars, we begin this year’s chart with a classic from that most pernicious strain of seasonal hot take: the War on Christmas. Every year, lazy columnists and commentators jump on the idea that the word ‘Christmas’ is being banished by some hidden band of curmudgeonly commissars. It’s always cynical in the extreme and William Sitwell’s entry into this particular canon of carping is especially craven:
… here comes chocolate brand Tony’s, willingly shielding us from the religious connotations that come with the word “advent”, by again selling its “Tony’s Chocolonely Countdown Calendar”…
Tony’s do seem to be trailblazers here with their brazen, non-Christmassy product. But they form part of the wider woke brigade’s drive to insipid, inclusivity-positing. In our glorious melting pot of multiculturalism, they seem to suggest, the rituals of Christianity are offensive.
Or — and bear with me here — the designers of this particular advent calendar were just taken with the alliterative phrase Chocoloney Countdown Calendar rather than joining in with a vast conspiracy to destroy the very festival they’re profiting from.
Notice also that Sitwell says “again”. He’s been aware of Tony’s branding for a while but needs it as the hook for his latest complaint, which also drags in claims that Tesco is doing away with Christmas trees — it isn’t — and M&S despises tradition because it hasn’t slapped the word ‘Christmas’ on its iced fruit cake.
Still, it’s a cheering Christmas vision to imagine Sitwell face down in the supermarket having a toddler-style tantrum over a box of biscuits that’s insufficiently respectful of Christ’s birthday. No doubt he’ll recycle his rage at the “mercantile weaklings” for a handy bit of Christmas present money this time next year.
24. Peter Hitchens (🆕 entry)
Dyslexia doesn’t exist. It’s a made-up affliction that’s become a
multi-million pound industry around children who haven’t been taught to read
12 March 2025, The Mail on Sunday
Who is going to break it to Jamie Oliver that dyslexia likely does not exist? And when they do, will the famous cook be delighted that he has at last been freed from the burden of this mythical complaint? Or will he be cross?
I’d guess cross. For dyslexia is one of those rare afflictions that people actually want to have. In this, it is like its equally fictional cousin ADHD. Both have no objective, testable, falsifiable diagnosis. Yet both bring certain privileges to those who think they have them…
This is also a multi-million pound industry – there are now alleged to be 870,000 children with dyslexia in Britain. And those who dare criticise it can expect a lot of howls of rage. Hence the near-universal praise heaped on people such as Jamie Oliver who identify as dyslexia patients.
Peter Hitchens is one of the most reliably fascinating columnists in Britain. Ever year, he rages about the clocks changing and remains resolute in his conviction that the former Labour Prime Minister he always calls either Anthony Blair or “the Blair creature” remains a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist. Sometimes, given the sheer amount of opinions he pumps out, Hitchens is even right about something.
That’s not the case with the column that’s made him chart-worthy this year. In it, he angrily asserts that something doesn’t exist because it doesn’t fit with his world view. His arguments around dyslexia are the same as the one he’s put forward to dismiss addiction — these people are simply too lazy and/or morally weak. It’s also key to the Hitchens self-mythology that he be the truthteller saying the thing that no one else dares to utter aloud so he’ll always make sure to predict “howls of rage”. This isn’t a howl of rage, more a long sigh at the boring inevitability of it all.
23. Rafael Behr (re-entry)
’In a frightening new era, Starmer has made his move — and may have found his calling’
25 February 2025, The Guardian
British politics is having one of its periodic outbreaks of polarised consensus. This is the paradoxical condition that occurs from time to time when the ruling party and the official opposition are forced by circumstance to have the same policy, while compelled by traditional enmity to resent the convergence.
The pressure on Keir Starmer to raise defence spending to 2.5% of gross domestic product has been building steadily in recent months, and independently of Tory demands that he do it…
The national reserve of blitz spirit has been depleted by too many peacetime invocations over the years. This time, sadly, the martial language is no metaphor. That doesn’t give Starmer a great deal more leeway. His inscrutability is a barrier to persuasion. He doesn’t match many people’s archetype of a charismatic wartime leader. But he is also capable of wielding the authority of his office with purposeful, old-fashioned solidity. There are worse traits a prime minister could have – and much worse leaders on display – in this frightening new era.
It’s not entirely fair to criticise columnists beholden to weekly or even daily deadlines for failing to make good predictions, but they tend to be so smug about it that it’s hard not to fall into the trap. This column from Rafael Behr creeps into the lower reaches of this year’s chart not just for that smugness but for the ‘I’m a grown up’ pose of cheering more spending on weaponry and the general further enshittification of life.
What makes the column even worse is that Behr has spent the rest of 2025 having to point out all the ways Starmer is making a mess of his premiership. That calling he found didn’t last very long at all.
22. Caitlin Moran (⬇️ 20)
’Social media is dead — none of my friends are posting any more’
24 November 2025, The Times
Ten years ago, I was convinced — like many people — that social media was the future of human communication. Who needed the town square, the water cooler or the pub when on your laptop or phone you could chat with the whole world? You could talk to family, friends, colleagues and neighbours at the same time and add photos and videos — like you were your own, self-contained broadcasting hub. You could even be sassy with the Pope or Barack Obama, because they were there too. Everyone was there, on social media. IRL was dead. Clearly, this was a superior way of chatting. The 21st-century way. An improvement. The future.
A decade later, and it’s very clear that this is not the future of human communication at all. Or an improvement. It turns out, “communicating with the whole world” is not something we are built to do. Statistics on anxiety, depression and general pessimism have gone through the roof — and everyone knows social media has played a part in it.
Given that Caitlin Moran nearly topped last year’s chart with a column that bordered on erotic fiction about Keir Starmer (“…every middle-aged woman I know feels, right now, kind of … fruity…”), she’d have had to really go some to match that performance this year. Instead, the former self-styled queen bee of British Twitter, has slipped into the rundown with a cringeworthy obituary for social media.
She notes that people have “realised that there is little to gain, and a huge amount to lose, by creating free content for a billionaire’s online platform… why would you bother?” Quite right, especially as she’s got such a good gig being paid to create content for a much older billionaire’s online platform…
21. Tony Parsons (🆕 entry)
’We live in terrifying & uncertain times — this is why King Charles and Prince William are more important than ever’
5 March 2025, The Sun
… in the midst of all the global turbulence, the soft power of our Royal Family feels like a force for good.
The King did not have to make time to meet the President of Ukraine. The Prince of Wales does not have to visit British troops in Estonia next week.
They do it because this country still knows who its friends are, we still know what we believe and we still understand the value of our freedom. The King meets Zelensky and the prince meets the troops because, whatever Trump may believe, some things matter more than the next deal.
We can all understand why the majority of Europeans now look at America as an unreliable partner. But an alliance that has ensured the peace and prosperity of the West cannot be broken by one rogue administration.
And when the King honours President Trump on a second state visit to this country, America and the world will be reminded of the values we still share. And of the enduring — and very real — power of the British Royal Family.
Once upon a time, Tony Parsons was one of the NME’s hip young gunslingers, but for many years, he’s been one of the tabloid press’ most reliable grumpy hip pain havers. If there’s a twee, establishment-protecting, ‘remember when bin men were hard’, ‘don’t you miss Spangles?” opinion to be had, you can expect to hear it from him.
His column in praise of King Charles and Prince William was the journalistic equivalent of a monarchist tea towel or a set of dusty commemorative plates left to moulder on the high shelf of the sideboard. The King met Zelensky and William went to visit British troops because they have to at least pretend to do something useful.
Part 2 of the 25 Worst Columns of 2025 will be out Wednesday 10th December. Thanks for reading. Please share this edition…
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You can also buy a t-shirt if you’d like to make a one-off contribution and get a t-shirt. My book, Breaking: How the Media Works, When it Doesn’t, and Why it Matters, is out now and would make a really good Christmas present for any family member who believes what they read in the Daily Mail.
Ah, it’s that time of year again! Love it.
I might just theme these entries this year by making it a point to have a mulled wine laced with whisky while reading.