Best Of

Alternative list of “Best” Britons of the 21st Century

Jade Goody
Michelle Mone
Jared O’Mara
Russell Brand
Bonnie Blue
John Darwin
Liz Truss
Katie Price’s son Harvey
Camila Batmanghelidjh
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor
Fred Goodwin
Pete Doherty
Henry Bolton
Nadine Dorries
Phillip Schofield
Shamima Begum
Harold Shipman
Carl Beech
Max Clifford
Marc Francois
Sally Bercow

Put like that, maybe we should be glad that things are going as well as they are.

Why the dislike for Jade Goody? She was fairly crass, but generally harmless and died 15 years ago at the age of only 29.

She didn’t do anything particularly wrong though

Shilpa Shetty would beg to differ.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebrity_Big_Brother_(British_series_5)_racism_controversy

Shetty was the one being obnoxious towards Jade imo.

I am sure you are on your own on that one.

Danielle Lloyd who was involved in the racist bullying of Shilpa Shetty lost a shit load of lucrative modelling contracts because of her behaviour.

Goody, Budden, Tweed, O' Meara and Lloyd were absolutely disgusting. The elevation of Jade Goody along with her repulsive mother to national treasure status was the lowest point during the Blair government years.

Some would say that academic publications being plagiarised by the ex-pornographer, Alistair Campbell, were the low point.

At to Big Brither, everyone involved should have been sentenced to 6 months house arrest. In the same house.

Can you take this call? I have Alistair Campbell's lawyers on the line.

Happy New Year pb!
Without noticing, to erroneously paraphrase HMHH, it's become cliched to he cynical about new year. "Oh, we don't really do anything - we're in bed by 10.30". Well, that's fine, and each to their own, bu reflecting on this on the evening of the 30th, NYE is genuinely important to me. Christmas is all about family - whom I am genuinely grateful for - but NYE is all about the friends you choose. People my age do NYE down, but NYEs have genuinely been some of the most memorable and brilliant nights of my life. Some have bèen disappointing (Sheffield 00/01 I'm looking at you) but a surprisingly large number have been brilliant. And tonight was no exception.
Christmas is about the family you're given, NYE is about the friends you choose I feel prodoundly lucky on both counts.

Alternative list of “Best” Britons of the 21st Century

Jade Goody
Michelle Mone
Jared O’Mara
Russell Brand
Bonnie Blue
John Darwin
Liz Truss
Katie Price’s son Harvey
Camila Batmanghelidjh
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor
Fred Goodwin
Pete Doherty
Henry Bolton
Nadine Dorries
Phillip Schofield
Shamima Begum
Harold Shipman
Carl Beech
Max Clifford
Marc Francois
Sally Bercow

Put like that, maybe we should be glad that things are going as well as they are.

Why the dislike for Jade Goody? She was fairly crass, but generally harmless and died 15 years ago at the age of only 29.

She didn’t do anything particularly wrong though

Shilpa Shetty would beg to differ.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebrity_Big_Brother_(British_series_5)_racism_controversy

Shetty was the one being obnoxious towards Jade imo.

Goody was ignorant and racist. Shetty was condescending and rude.

Meanwhile, in "auld acquaintance" news,



And yes, I pass this on purely to cue up the meme.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/12/31/i-hate-to-say-it-but-zulu-is-a-left-wing-film/

Former PB contributor @SeanT has just caught on that Zulu is a class-based critique of the class structure in the British army. Next week, he'll write an article about how Rosebud is the sled (yes I know about the Marion Davis clitoris theory). Piercing insight, our lad.

One of the saddest things about getting old is how the next generation is excitedly discovering things about the past that were either blisteringly bloody obvious at the time, or totally wrong. Tom Harwood on Twitter is excitedly and neurotically reporting that the abbreviation for the United Kingdom (UK) is a neologism that wasn't really used until the Good Friday agreement, which is just plain wrong. A generation is getting its info from Twitter and Grok instead of books, and they are thick as horseshit.

There is just a smidgeon of truth there. Britain was an official synonym for the UK. Britain, not Great Britain.

‘The UK’ only replaced ‘Britain’ as the usual collective name when Boris shoved it down our collective throats to gaslight the good people of Northern Ireland that he hadn't just sold them out by placing a border down the Irish Sea.

Representatives of the UK have been seated next to reps of the US for as long as I can remember (I'm over 75).

Yes, that is the name of the country. Britain (and hence British) is a synonym for UK, not for Great Britain. However, the recently increased prominence of UK dates from Boris selling out Northern Ireland (possibly because he never understood the issue of the border in the first place).

For instance, your passport probably says British at the top and United Kingdom at the bottom, yet we have only since Brexit changed number plates from GB to UK. In the Olympics I think we are still GB&NI with &NI in very small letters.

I think this is entirely in your head.

And your evidence is... what? Clearly I'm right about the use of Britain and British, clearly I'm right about the Brexit barrier down the Irish Sea which Boris had earlier ruled out, and clearly I'm right about the increased use of UK since Boris's time, so the only part I could be wrong on is Boris's motivation.

the notion that the use of the term UK is anything to do with Johnson, it's been common parlance my entire lifetime

The increased use, not use.

There's no evidence of increased use of United Kingdom over Great Britain

I suspect an analysis of the BBC's output would show a different picture. This story is typical:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy594gkele3o

We may be missing a trick. The (percieved) increased use of UK may be simply down to the rise of the internet ".uk" suffix. For example, here is the BBC Politics 97 site from 1997, before the GFA https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/special/politics97/

Those graphics make my eyes bleed

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/31/xi-jinping-vows-reunification-china-taiwan-new-years-eve-speech

China’s president, Xi Jinping, has vowed to reunify China and Taiwan in his annual New Year’s Eve speech in Beijing.

Xi will never have a better opportunity to annex Taiwan than whilst your dipshit President is in the Whitehouse.

Given his age, this year is probably his last opportunity.

Make sure your computers are up to date and that you are not overexposed on tech stocks including AI.

It was made 30 years ago, but the first Mission Impossible movie actually mentions AI, briefly

That movie really annoys me. Jim Phelps was no traitor!

I watched it recently.
It now looks very outdated, and it’s actually quite dull except for the famous scene where they break into the Pentagon and the Eurostar scene, which remains breathtaking.

No electrified tracks - it's on BBC1 right now!

I've never seen any of the other films and I think the lack of electrification in the first film is a big reason for that.

Yesterday Ukrainian drones knocked out electricity supplies to a Moscow suburb. The grid hasn't been repaired yet, but large numbers of mobile generators were rushed to the area to supply electricity.

This evening those generators ran out of diesel.

Putin will be on the phone to President Xi with a large order for solar panels. How can they run out of diesel? It's not as if Russia has to import the stuff and they can't export it.

In this instance I think it's just incompetence that nobody organised refuelling the generators.

Russia did have to import diesel earlier in the year, and they were exporting it until Ukraine started damaging their oil refineries and Russia banned exports.

Two Black Sea oil export ports hit by drone strikes this evening too, damaging Russia's ability to export oil to pay for the war. Some people are starting to say that Ukraine has sustained an increase in the volume of long-distance strikes it is making inside Russia, but it might be a bit early to be sure about that.