Good day, dearest Times reader, and welcome to the week when the Northern Irish band Kneecap continued to make global headlines after video footage emerged from their concerts in 2023 and 2024, when the band allegedly shouted, “Up Hamas! Up Hezbollah!” and declared, “The only good Tory is a dead Tory. Kill your local MP.”
Kneecap
Not surprisingly, in the face of these criminal allegations, the band have already had a string of concerts pulled, been called “evil” by the shadow home secretary, and there are now calls for them to be banned from this year’s Glastonbury Festival.
Before we go any further on this subject, on which I am going to be vexingly centrist, I need to bring up last year’s Bafta-nominated Kneecap film, which I suspect a lot of those who have condemned Kneecap have not watched — and so perhaps don’t quite understand on what level Kneecap are “being Kneecap”.
• Kneecap: have Belfast’s rap provocateurs finally gone too far?
Kneecap is up there with the work of Succession’s Jesse Armstrong, or 24 Hour Party People’s Frank Cottrell-Boyce. All three members of the band play themselves, as teenage, drug-dealing self-saboteurs from a Northern Irish council estate who shoot their mouths off but are also wryly aware they’re teenage, drug-dealing self-saboteurs who shoot their mouths off.
Imagine a teenage John Lennon saying, “The Beatles are bigger than Christ,” while off his face on ketamine and then meeting the subsequent global outrage with, “And now, I’m being crucified! Point proven!” before stage-diving into the crowd.
This, then, is the band currently being assessed by counterterrorism police. If the police find out they did do these things, presumably, Kneecap will face criminal charges and it will be up to them how they respond to this. Their sudden fame has put them on a massive learning curve, re shouting utterly stupid, dangerous and illegal things on stage.
But we should always allow people the opportunity to learn from their mistakes. Back in 1989 the beloved folk artist Cat Stevens, who had changed his name to Yusuf Islam, appeared to support Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie. “He must be killed — the Quran makes it clear. If someone defames the prophet, then he must die.” He later said he was a “firm believer in the law” yet “was never a supporter of the fatwa” — but at the time his comments caused a similar level of outrage to those of Kneecap.
However, by 2023 Stevens was playing Wild World on the Pyramid Stage of Glastonbury, in the “legends” slot. And when Rushdie was attacked, in 2022, Stevens released a passionate statement condemning the attack and wishing Rushdie a full recovery. More often than not, provocation and outrage are simply the beginning of a thought process. Jog the film on a few decades and everyone’s playing a different character. You just have to let the story play out.
Pets Corner
Divorce news from the world of the ultra-wealthy, and Dean Richmond, the multimillionaire owner of the Pets Corner chain, is currently going through a bit of hoo-ha in his personal life.
Or, as MailOnlineput it with an odd note of pride, “Pets Corner tycoon locked in £100m divorce battle with wife of ten years but has already moved on with a new younger lover (and moved her in 10 minutes down the road!)”
Of course, one never wants to speculate too much over the bare bones of a story. Every situation has so many complexities, so much nuance, that we do ourselves no favours at all to attempt analysis, or conclusions, from a distance. However, I can’t help but note that, for the owner of a pet supplies store, Richmond’s behaviour is a bit … 1970s parent/pet owner? He’s lost a wife then immediately gets another one. And one, I note, that looks a lot like the first one. In the way that parents in those days would notice that Jaws the goldfish had died — then simply replace him with a new one. Maybe from Pets Corner. Perhaps he even told his kids that his first wife had “gone to live on a farm”. It’s all very on-brand.
Alexander Skarsgard
And so, with the James Bond franchise having been mothballed for so long — No Time to Die came out in 2021 and there is, as yet, no director or title for the next film, and no one cast as Bond — something fairly predictable has started to happen: everyone’s starting to think they could reboot Bond. Like a jam jar with a very stiff lid, the challenge is irresistible.
“Let me have a go!” comes the cry, from both people watching someone struggle with a jar of raspberry Bonne Maman and showbiz people eyeing the dusty Bond. “I could totally do a Bond! Honest! Give it here!”
The first celebrity to eagerly take on the Jar of Bond is Alexander Skarsgard — Hollywood’s go-to sexy Swedish bad guy, and the man who managed to make a gold bomber jacket look good in Succession. Skarsgard has looked upon Bond, and judged himself qualified to take over.
“I could be a very polite, diplomatic, Swedish James Bond — one who negotiates,”Skarsgard told The Timesthis week. “There’ll be no violence at all. It’ll just be boardroom meetings where people try to find consensus, everyone’s stressed out, and desperately tries to avoid an argument, or complications. That’s very Swedish. I’ll pitch it!”
• Alexander Skarsgard: ‘I could be a Swedish Bond’
Of course, with this pitch Skarsgard has certainly demonstrated he can handle one of the old Bond’s characteristics: humour. I’m sure he was chuckling to himself, in a Swedish way, all through saying this.
But where Skarsgard goes with wry, Scandi humour, soon comes the deluge. For, with Bond still in storage, it’s only a matter of time before every interview with every writer, actor or director starts to work as an open, public pitch for them to be given the 007, the PPK, and the SEX. Jason Statham will suggest a Bond “who punches even more people, and doesn’t bother with all that ‘talking stuff’”; Peter Kay will offer a northern Bond into garlic bread; and various influencers will pitch in with a Bond who pauses fight scenes to set up a ringlight and then film himself karate-chopping people on his phone while addressing the audience at home: “Hi guys! A lot of you have been asking how I crumple the windpipe of a baddie! So I’m just going to take you through it, step by step!”
Hackers
The news pages are currently alight with a series of cyberattacks on British institutions by a criminal blackmailing organisation calling itself, with the typical swagger of teenage boys who haven’t left their bedrooms for six months and struggle to wash regularly, “DragonForce”.
Marks & Spencer has seen hundreds of millions wiped off its share value as its computer system struggles from the co-ordinated hacking. Harrods is reeling from a similar outage, and more attacks have been “promised” in the coming weeks. Presumably when DragonForce have time, in between watching old clips of Robot Wars on YouTube.
Another British institution under siege from DragonForce is the Co-op. A spokesadolescent for DragonForce contacted the BBC to boast that the group had infiltrated the Co-op’s IT networks and stolen huge amounts of customer data.
• M&S and Co-op cyberattackers ‘tricked IT into resetting passwords’
So far DragonForce has refused to say what it plans to do with all this Co-op customer data. Although many have presumed that this is to retain an air of mystery and menace, I suspect it’s more to do with the fact its operatives don’t actually know what to do with it. I’ve got a Co-op supermarket loyalty card so I know exactly what typical “treasure troves” of data DragonForce are currently sifting through. Some very good discounts on bread, milk and eggs; a 100 per cent commitment to only buying recycled loo roll; and a palpable air of guilt when buying green beans that have been flown in from Kenya.
I have no idea what Kevin and Perry DragonForce will do with all this humdrum, do-gooding data, but I strongly suggest they hack somewhere with more interesting and influential customers in the future. Although we don’t yet have the saying “as boring and unblackmailable as a Co-op loyalty cardholder’s data”, we all know it’s viable.
Elon Musk
This week Elon Musk revealed his motivation for pressing ahead with his manned missions to Mars. “Eventually all life on Earth will be destroyed by the sun,” he told Fox News, looking stricken. “The sun is gradually expanding and so we do at some point need to be a multiplanet civilisation, because Earth will be incinerated.”
• Why Elon Musk’s plan to put a million people on Mars is doomed to fail
Elon! This is, of course, true, but it’s not due to happen for another five billion years. There’s a lot of wriggle room there. I’m just not sure it needs to be on your to-do list right now. Take some of your 300 children to the park instead. “I’m preparing for the ultimate subsumation of the Earth by the sun” just sounds, to be honest, like a billionaire’s excuse to get out of childcare.
The Met Gala
This year the Met Gala — which exists in a world where the phrase “the most important party of the year” is taken very seriously — has witnessed some truly seismic and unexpected celebrity tectonic plate action. In the A-list world it has been the equivalent of the Indian plate and the Eurasian plate grinding up against each other and causing the formation of the Himalayas; or the Pacific plate causing some manner of Nobu-goers Ring of Fire.
What is the kerfuffle? Well, it’s the lack of kerfuffle that’s the kerfuffle. As in: people are already referring to the 2025 bash as “the Meh Gala”. Put simply: it seems to be suffering some manner of stellar waneage.
At first this might seem an overreaction. This year’s theme was “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style”, and Stevie Wonder turned up in a regal robe fully 20 feet long. Andre 3000 from Outkast arrived with a whole piano strapped to his back. And Lisa, a Thai singer and actress from The White Lotus, caused a lot of raised eyebrows by turning up in a pair of knickers embroidered with what appeared to some to be a picture of the civil rights hero Rosa Parks on her crotch. Whatever the ultimate political statement being made is still being hotly debated online. Either way, it’s caused a lot of heat.
At first glance, then, the coverage of the Met Gala does not suggest it is an event so troubled that the Labour government should step in and nationalise it after they’ve dealt with the trains, and the poo in Lake Windermere.
However, seasoned Met Gala observers — by which I mean women and gay men — have found much to trouble them. As reported in last week’s Celebrity Watch, Naomi Campbell launched an early attack on the Gala, explaining that she would not be attending this year’s event as “I’m too old. It’s too much for me. The anxiety.”
To learn that Campbell was anxious about walking up a red carpet, in a beautiful outfit, at a party themed around “black fashion”, was discombobulating to many: like hearing Erling Haaland whispering, “Every time I see a beach ball I want to run away,” or Donald Trump admitting, “Every time I talk about myself it makes me feel so sad.”
• Met Gala 2025: Rihanna and Zendaya among best dressed stars
However, it seems like Campbell’s Met Shrug has started a trend. Because when the Met Gala was held, on Monday night, another fashion icon — Sarah Jessica Parker — was also notable by her absence. “I’m working,” she had explained, briskly, in regards to her RSVP DGAF.
Well, for a fashion party to lose Naomi Campbell might be seen as unfortunate. To lose Carrie Bradshaw from Sex and the City is … like abandoning a baby at a train station in a nondesigner handbag. As the evening went on, and the list of other notable no-shows started to increase — including Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Ariana Grande, Jennifer Lopez, Beyoncé and Lady Gaga — people started to wonder if something more fundamental was afoot. Is Anna Wintour, finally, losing her power? Does staying on her good side — in the hopes of getting a Vogue cover — mean nothing in an era when Vogue sells a million copies a month but Lady Gaga has 60 million followers on Instagram?
Or is it just that female celebrities are starting to find high fashion parties, well, boring? As anyone who’s watched behind-the-scenes footage of the Met Gala will know, to be an attendee seems like a fairly arduous act: months of wrangling over designers and dresses; punitive diets; industrial levels of filler and Botox — even in your feet, so your heels don’t hurt! — and then, if your dress is a crinoline, being delivered onto the red carpet from the back of a van. Like you’re an extra-wide American fridge from John Lewis. It’s a long, long way from applying deodorant, lippy and a can of G&T on the bus, and then dancing to Oops Upside Your Head.
If so, then Naomi, Sarah Jessica, Taylor, Katy, Ariana, Jennifer, Beyoncé and Lady Gaga — welcome to middle age! I support your desire to not be out of the house after 6pm on a weeknight! It is your right, as people whose cellular regeneration stopped at 25, to veto the audacity of an event that is broadcast in HD and apparently has a very skimpy buffet.
Perhaps, if the Met Gala is to continue for another 70 years, someone should suggest to Wintour that she makes it a Met brunch instead. After all, everyone’s up for jeans and eggs. And no one can say they’re too anxious or too busy working for a brunch. That’s why they were invented.
