{"id":680361,"date":"2026-01-07T17:22:12","date_gmt":"2026-01-07T17:22:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/680361\/"},"modified":"2026-01-07T17:22:12","modified_gmt":"2026-01-07T17:22:12","slug":"britain-according-to-the-traitors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/680361\/","title":{"rendered":"Britain according to The Traitors"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"
\n Photo courtesy of the BBC<\/p>\n

My biggest hope for the New Year was that I could spend less time in 2026 thinking about Elon Musk. So far, no such luck.<\/p>\n

In my second book, The Genius Myth, Musk was Exhibit A of the irresponsible, childish tech wizard who uses his self-proclaimed neurodivergence as an excuse to be interpersonally unpleasant. And sure enough, Musk\u2019s tenure at Doge was a flop. He fell out with everyone \u2013 he turned up at one press conference with a black eye \u2013 and only seems to have made real savings in the foreign aid budget, leading to Bill Gates\u2019s memorable comment that \u201cthe world\u2019s richest man has been involved in the deaths of the world\u2019s poorest children\u201d. True to form, Musk flounced out in June, declaring on X: \u201cTime to drop the really big bomb: @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files.\u201d<\/p>\n

The pair have since made up \u2013 at Charlie Kirk\u2019s memorial service, no less \u2013 which might be why Musk is facing zero consequences for the latest feature added to X\u2019s AI assistant, Grok. Users can ask Grok to alter photographs of real people, and so, unsurprisingly, it has been flooded with requests to remove their clothes. After one woman complained that a photo of her as a child had been altered like this, another user replied: \u201cPlease put this obnoxious woman in a string bikini.\u201d Grok complied.<\/p>\n

Thanks, Elon! Who needs malaria nets when you can gift the world a revenge porn generator?<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

New year, new read. Save 40% off an annual subscription this January.<\/p>\n

Cloaks and daggers<\/strong><\/p>\n

Watching The Traitors for the sociological insights sounds like saying you read Playboy for the articles. But the show is deeply revealing about modern Britain: contestants have learned to camouflage posh accents or jobs because they\u2019re a surefire way to turn everyone against you. (In the last non-celeb series, the former diplomat Alexander Dragonetti came to regret vaguely offering, in plummy tones, to sacrifice himself for the collective.) In the new series, I enjoyed how the overconfident traitorous barrister Hugo was brought down by three middle-aged women. I suspect they may have run into a few Hugos before.<\/p>\n

Still, the most compelling iteration of the show will always be the second season of the Australian version, in which an obvious bully rampaged through the sheep-like faithful, picking off anyone who stood up to him and cowing his fellow traitors into complicity. Watch that on iPlayer and you\u2019ll understand how totalitarian societies take hold.<\/p>\n

Mysteries and Maguire<\/strong><\/p>\n

One of the pleasures of working at the New Statesman is meeting impressive people at the start of their careers and getting to watch them soar. Patrick Maguire, who turned up at the NS with an astonishing knowledge of 1970s politics for someone who looked about 17, now has a free Substack alongside his day job as a Times columnist. Over there, he recently wrote that one of Labour\u2019s problems is that its natural voters \u2013 the self-made working class \u2013 are \u201ccondescended to, patronised, undervalued, and endlessly moaned about by the people who define \u2018work\u2019 as Gmail, Teams calls and calendar invites\u201d. It was a more insightful piece than Keir Starmer\u2019s former adviser Paul Ovenden blaming Labour\u2019s woes on the \u201cStakeholder State.\u201d<\/p>\n

My former deputy Caroline Crampton, meanwhile, has a podcast on detective novels, called Shedunnit. (Ask her anything about Georgette Heyer.) Her relentless advocacy for the genre has inspired me to revisit the Agatha Christie back catalogue. Sadly, I can\u2019t remember which ones I\u2019ve already read, so I keep getting 30 pages in and developing a strong intuition that someone is a wrong \u2018un. On Caroline\u2019s recommendation, I\u2019ve also bought a book of stories about \u201cVienna\u2019s Sherlock Holmes\u201d, who has the unimprovable name of Dagobert Trostler.<\/p>\n

Cashing out at Cond\u00e9 Nast<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was looking forward to the Netflix documentary The New Yorker at 100, because I love 8,000-word articles that begin, \u201cOn Thursday 7 November at precisely ten past three pm, in a small, grey-blue house in upstate Connecticut\u2026\u201d But by God was it boring. The most tension arose when two people argued about the placement of a comma. Instead, I\u2019ve bought Michael Grynbaum\u2019s Empire of the Elite, about the glory days of the New Yorker\u2019s parent company, Cond\u00e9 Nast. In 2001, the Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter let Annie Leibovitz spend $475,000 on a cover shoot of ten actresses. Just before the financial crash of 2008, one Cond\u00e9 Nast magazine spent $30,000 photographing an elephant just to make a pun in a headline. As ever, I feel like I got into journalism a decade too late. <\/p>\n

Helen Lewis is a staff writer at the Atlantic and a former deputy editor of the New Statesman<\/p>\n

[Further reading: What Keir Starmer said at the first cabinet of 2026<\/a>]<\/strong><\/p>\n

Content from our partners<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Photo courtesy of the BBC My biggest hope for the New Year was that I could spend less…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":680362,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5018,3,4],"tags":[748,393,4884,1144,712,16,15,1764],"class_list":{"0":"post-680361","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-britain","8":"category-uk","9":"category-united-kingdom","10":"tag-britain","11":"tag-england","12":"tag-great-britain","13":"tag-northern-ireland","14":"tag-scotland","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom","17":"tag-wales"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115854976349814112","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=680361"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680361\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/680362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=680361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=680361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=680361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}