The 25 Worst Columns of 2025, Part Two: Bullies cosplaying as victims, monarchy fan fiction, and the never-ending search for the 'good' Tory...
Our annual look at the commentariat's most contemptuous content continues.
We counted down the worst columns of 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024. Now it’s year five, and the curse continues. This year’s countdown spans this month, culminating on New Year’s Eve. If you missed part one, you can read it here. Now let’s ‘enjoy’ the next act of this noxious nativity…
20. Giles Coren [⬇️ 11]
BBC presenter? They’ll come for you too
18 July 2025, The Times
The glory of the BBC is that you never know. You just know that however good a person you are, however well you do your job, they’re gonna stick it to you at some point to save their ugly arses. And they won’t do it to your face. Or with honour or decency. It’ll come in the dark, from a coward, hired to do it by a bigger coward. You won’t see who did it. It’s not a bullet between the eyes or a grenade in the hatch. You don’t see the knife go in at the BBC. It’s the tip of a poisoned umbrella at a crowded wrap party: you feel a scratch, you clutch your thigh, you turn around, but the assassin is gone with the swish of a cloak, the room clears, your friends desert you, and you die quietly and alone.
There’s been a space on this chart for Giles Coren every year since its inception. After more than 30 years as a hereditary columnist at The Times, Coren is so reliably awful that he can be as certain of placing as Slade was of having hit singles in the seventies; he’s the Noddy Holder of having appalling opinions.
As a long-term observer of Coren’s output — it’s a terrible affliction — I’m alive to the themes within it. One of the most frequent is the notion that — despite his infuriating insulation from consequences — he’s actually awfully put upon, a prime example of the upper-middle-class white man who pretends he’s under perpetual attack. The column that made him chartbound this year exemplifies that.
Hopping on the news that Gregg Wallace and John Torode were out at Masterchef, Coren took the chance to moan about the three occasions he was moved on as a presenter on BBC shows, all recounted with a “nonetheless, I had the last laugh” tone. His theory is that having never been fired by the BBC, always managing to jump before he was pushed, he is 3-0 up against the corporation. Curiously, though, he still felt the need to write a bitter column about the experience. Thank god, he’s still got his “proper, grown-up job” at The Times.
19. Brendan O’Neill [⬆️ 1]
Oasis: The joyous roar of a forgotten people
23 August 2025, Spiked
There were no Palestine flags. No trans flags. No solemnly issued lies from the stage about how transwomen are women. No climate-change bollocks. No ‘Fuck the Tories’. If Led By Donkeys had rocked up with one of their shit light shows telling the crowd what a disaster Brexit has been, they’d have been lynched, or certainly told to piss off back to their snug in that poncy Stoke Newington pub they hang out in. As Noel once advised worthy bands: ‘Play your fucking tunes and get off.’ No one gave a damn what ‘race’ you were or what your pronouns are. All that mattered in this electric, mirthful mob is that you had a bucket hat, a pint and stamina. It felt like a free zone, ungoverned by the choking etiquette of our bland, whining, sobering ruling class. It was, honestly, glorious.
Just as the cinemas are often bogged down with sequels and reboots, this year’s chart brings you a repeat from the former number one worst columnist in Britain, Brendan O’Neill. He made last year’s rundown with ‘An Oasis reunion is exactly what woke, bland Britain needs’, and he’s back this year with the columnist’s equivalent of Carl Douglas following Kung Fu Fighting with Do The Kung Fu.
Brendan (2024) predicted that Oasis’ reunion would be the antidote to woke. Brendan (2025) is delighted to announce that his earlier incarnation was right. The column reveals that he has precisely the kind of fragile ego that he spends his time railing against. While he claims in the column that he wasn’t thinking about any of the things he writes about during the gig, it seems pretty clear that his joy at seeing the Gallaghers back together was tempered by the imaginary army of woke killjoys that live permanently in his head.
He rages that the crowd at the Oasis concert were the “people we rarely hear about because they’re not nearly exotic enough for media elites obsessed with drag queens, drunk on ‘Islamophobia’ sob stories and friends with pricks who think they’ve suffered structural oppression because the Oxford college they studied at didn’t have a seperate bog for genderqueer demisexuals like them”. I must have been in an alternate dimension when the Oasis tour was on because it seemed to me that there was scarcely a radio bulletin or TV news programme without mention of it/a vox pop with delighted concertgoers. But then, accepting that the Oasis reunion was happily covered by the very media that O’Neil claims is too snobby to recognise it would deprive him of another chance to act like a victimised bully.
18. Fleet Street Fox (⬆️ 3)
Glastonbury is a middle-class hate crime —
it’s time to put it out of its misery
30 June 2025, The Daily Mirror
I’m not saying the columnists of Britain were even more obsessed with Glastonbury than usual this year, but this is the first of three columns focused on it that make this year’s chart. While Kneecap’s performance didn’t provide the outrage fodder they expected, Bob Vylan’s ‘death to the IDF’ chant gave the professional opinion-havers a chance to wring their hands and turn the dudgeon dial up to high. Their free speech arguments evaporated in favour of mawkish moralising, and Fleet Street Fox’s contribution was possibly the most mawkish and pompous of them all:
Glastonbury has long been the place where common sense went to die. From an indie, hippie festival in a field it’s become an industry of its own, with established, mainstream acts vying with smaller ones purely to cash in. But when it’s got to the point that Rod Stewart and Lulu are on the main stage, it needs more cops and cleaners than a recently-discovered mass grave, and genuine hippies can’t scrape together the entrance fee, it’s no longer serving any purpose beyond pure, naked capitalism…
… Glastonbury’s rather tainted star has fallen even further into the mire. It’s surely time for this middle-class, middle-of-the-road, money-making, maggot-attracting hate crime to take its final bow, and leave music festivals to people who still know that they’re supposed to involve some peace and love.
Otherwise, next year they’ll try to go one better, and we’ll see Ayatollah Khameini in the ‘legends’ slot, and bomb-making classes in a tepee.
I didn’t realise the Daily Mirror was so pro-hippie and anti-capitalism. Or could it be that Fleet Street Fox is only against the profit motive when she’s decided that she doesn’t like what’s being sold?
17. Polly Toynbee (re-entry)
I didn’t think I’d ever say this: let’s hope the Tory Party can be saved
7 October 2025, The Guardian
[Last charted in 2023 with To all the doubters who still think Labour too tame: read its policies – and finally believe]
Britain needs the Conservative party. That’s a line I never expected to write. For most of my life under their fiefdom, the “natural party of government” has commanded the media, business and political donations. It has presided, especially since the 1980s, over capital supremacy at the expense of labour, sky-high inequality, public service degradation and me-first individualism.
So it should be a joy to read its obituary everywhere, as it apparently faces “oblivion”, “the abyss” and “extinction”. The prospect of Britain without a Tory party is hard to grasp. But we may miss them if they are replaced with something worse. The next iteration of the right risks being the Trumpist, foreigner-persecuting world of Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson. Kemi Badenoch’s opening conference speech walked her party further along that plank: mimicking his policies, she makes Faragism respectable, a small step for Danny Kruger defectors.
Among liberal columnists, the search for the ‘good’ Tory never ends. Now, as the Conservative Party looks likely to tumble into oblivion at the next election, that inclination is evolving into the fantasy of some ‘better’ version of the Tories that might appear. That’s how we get Polly Toynbee writing whistfully about Michael Heseltine, a man who has lived long enough to be seen as a jolly nice chap because so many more egregious bastards have come along in his wake.
The argument Toynbee makes in her column is that a collection of ‘one-nation’ Tories could retake their party and deliver “a better brand of conservatism". It’s fairytale thinking; a false nostalgia for a Conservative Party that never existed and a dream of one that never could. The answer to fighting fascists is not to wish for a homeopathically diluted strain of right-wing thinking; it’s to persuade people that the answer is not to head rightwards at all.
16. Sarah Vine [⬇️ 4]
I can see so much Prince Philip in Louis. He has the same mischief dancing behind his eyes and an aura of boundless energy
24 April 2025, The Daily Mail.
The way British newspapers write about the Royal Family is always weird. This group of constitutionally caged humans that we keep to poke and prod are made odder by that observation. From birth, the Windsors are cursed to become strange creatures, and the commentators and columnists write about them exacerbates that process.
Just consider how Sarah Vine wrote about a photo of Prince Louis that was released to commemorate his seventh birthday:
He’s always had stacks of personality, but the latest picture of Prince Louis, taken on his seventh birthday, is a real corker.
He bears a striking resemblance to Grandpa Middleton; but there’s something about him that also reminds me of his great-grandfather on his father’s side, the late Duke of Edinburgh.
He has the same mischief dancing behind the eyes, the same aura of boundless energy.
‘Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man,’ wrote Prince Philip’s countryman, Aristotle. You can already see the outline of the young man Louis will become.
But no need to rush. For now, he’s still a little boy. He may look grown-up for his age, dressed as his dad’s mini-me in a checked shirt and scratchy green jumper, but that gappy smile gives it away.
Entirely unselfconscious as he gazes boldly into the camera, you get the sense that this is a child who has known only love and happiness.
It goes on like that for another 1,000 words. It’s a bizarre projection about a child by someone who doesn’t know him and will never know him. Vine writes about Louis as though he is a character in a soap opera because that is effectively his purpose in life. He was cast in the womb and will never get to play a different role.
She writes that “he’s still a little boy” and, later in the piece, of his “joyful innocence”, but here she is in the pages of a national newspaper assessing his qualities through the medium of a single staged photograph. In all likelihood, this isn’t actually the worst column that Vine has produced this year — she’s reliably terrible — but it is the weirdest. And we’re not supposed to point that out. This kind of grim monarchist mooning is treated as entirely ordinary, but in truth, it’s utterly bizarre. Among the many reasons I think we should have a republic, ending this captive breeding of humans to become tabloid fodder is high on the list.
Part 3 of the 25 Worst Columns of 2025 will be out on Wednesday 17th December. Thanks for reading. Please share this edition…
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