Auntie Claus is one of my favourite children's books. Our heroine lives in a New York penthouse. She is stylish, she wears a red velvet gown with white ermine trimming, and she is mysteriously absent from November to February every year. She has a famous brother. She also has a great-niece, Sophie, and Sophie has a brat of a brother called Chris. One year, Sophie stows away in the luggage and ends up with a bunch of elves doing seasonal work. Her last task is to retrieve the Bad Boys and Girls list from the basement… and on the list she sees her little brother's name. What happens next? That would be spoilers. Suffice it to say that this is a true morality story where virtue is ultimately rewarded.
It would be nice if that always happened in real life. But it doesn't. In fact things seem to be rapidly getting worse rather than better. Truly the world is going to hell in a handcart.
So when I was reading the Guardian today, I drew up two lists. The first is the Good Boys and Girls. The second is… well, you know.
Good Boys and Girls
Nikita Hand was sexually assaulted by the celeb fighter Conor McGregor in a Dublin hotel in 2018. She went to the police, he said she consented, and no criminal charges were brought against him. Undeterred, she brought a civil rape case. That meant she lost her anonymity. She had a very difficult four days in the witness box. But she won, and was awarded damages of nearly €250,000. She has now published her story in a best-selling book called Not the Perfect Victim. And she wasn't the perfect victim, because she was doing drink and drugs at the time. But her victory may encourage other assaulted women to be brave and follow her.
Sally Rooney is a novelist of principle and also based in the Irish Republic. In 2025 she expressed support for Palestine Action, a group which is proscribed in the UK but not in Ireland. This means she is unable to travel to the UK or she would risk arrest. Also, she said that proceeds from the sale of her books would be used to support Palestine Action. That in itself could constitute a criminal offence, so now she has instructed her publishers to withdraw her books from sale in the UK. No sales means no royalties for the author. She has taken a commercial hit by standing with Palestine against the multiple illegal actions of its genocidal oppressor.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the President of Ukraine, has been negotiating in good faith with the USA in an attempt to end the unprovoked Russian attack on his country. The latest negotiations ended abruptly when the Ukrainians discovered that Donald Trump had agreed to pay a huge amount of money to Russia in return for appears to be no more than 12 hours' supply of diesel oil. The money will strengthen the Russian military campaign against Ukraine. Trump has also called for regime change in Ukraine, on the basis that Zelenskyy has repeatedly refused to make a 'deal' with Russia (in other words, surrender large amounts of Ukrainian territory to its aggressive neighbour). But the Ukrainians are still defending themselves, and recently took out three big Russian data centres that were being used to spread disinformation on a global scale.
Bad Boys and Girls
I would be here all day and night if I tried to give a comprehensive list. So it's just a passing mention for all British political parties with the honourable exception of the Green Party and the democratic socialist Your Party. All the rest are either complicit in, or else silent about (and therefore complicit in) the Israeli genocide in Palestine. Prime Minister Andy Burnham, Labour's knight in shining armour, leads the charge in describing the recent Green Party motion on Zionism as anti-Semitic. He won't be calling out a genocide any time soon.
Question: what do the Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats and Reform have in common? Answer: all of them are backed by organisations which advocate for Israel: Conservative Friends of Israel, Labour Friends of Israel, Liberal Democrat Friends of Israel, and (the newest) Reform Friends of Israel. British politicians are not providing financial support to Israel. Instead the money flows the other way round – as revealed in an investigation by the British media organisation Declassified UK.
But there's only one contender for the first name on the list of Bad Boys and Girls. This is, of course, Donald Trump. Again, this could take some time, so I'm going to limit myself to just one of today's stories.
William Chapman, a 23-year old man, entered the tiger enclosure at Yorkshire Wildlife Park and was mauled to death. His family described him as 'bright, warm and engaging', but suffering from severe mental illness. This is a tragedy, and their privacy should be respected at this awful time. But with breathtaking insensitivity, the American President re-posted video footage on his social media channel which showed Chapman entering the enclosure and being attacked, followed by an AI-generated video of Trump play-fighting a tiger with the background music 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight'. This has caused severe distress to Chapman's family. Even by Trump's own very low standards, this plumbs a new depth.
Why…?
Why do people behave like this? In some cases – thinking of British politicians here – the love of money is the root of all evil. But in respect of Donald Trump, and others like him, one has to ask: is the evil pursued for its own sake? Are we looking at the modern equivalent of Shakespeare's Richard the Third, who enjoyed the evil that he did?
The philosopher Hannah Arendt coined the famous phrase 'the banality of evil' in her coverage of the 1961 war crimes trial of the Nazi bureaucrat Adolph Eichmann. He organised the transportation of millions of Jews and others to concentration camps in pursuit of the Final Solution. Arendt argued, controversially, that Eichmann committed evil acts but lacked evil intentions. He was just doing his job. He disengaged from the evil reality because he lacked empathy: he was unable to see things from another person's point of view.
Eichmann is an extreme case, but I can see the same reasoning applying to others and in particular to the American President. He does not see what he is doing as evil. And his followers share that view. Two things have brought this about. First, their conscience has ceased to function. They lack moral agency. They have reverted to a state where they cannot look beyond their own narrow self-interest. In this way they are no longer fully human.
Second, Trump and his followers have lost the ability to think critically. This is the inevitable result of years of ignoring the evidence in so many fields, ranging from international politics to the climate emergency. They believe what they want to believe, even if this requires them to state that black is white.
Which comes first: the intellectual decay or the moral decay? I think they feed off each other.
Is it always going to be like this? No. My favourite priest says we must all try to create a perfect world in the space around us. The bad state of the world should only strengthen our resolve to do good in our own small way in the hope that millions of small acts of kindness will turn the tide in the end.
Also, I cling to a belief that everything will be all right in the end; and if it's not all right, it's not the end. And so I try to live accordingly. This is an act of faith. But it's the only good way to live. This is the moral imperative. I am fortunate to be surrounded by so many people who feel the same.