Heroes and villains of 2024

Villain
Singapore, which paid Taylor Swift not to perform in any other countries in southeast Asia. Thailand’s furious prime minister claimed the city state coughed up $3m per show for her exclusive six-night run, forcing the region’s many Swifties to travel there and denying neighbouring governments considerable tourism revenue. Singapore’s prime minister confirmed “certain incentives” were provided to Swift, but the culture minister said the figure paid was “not anywhere as high as speculated”.

Villain
Farrow and Ball, whose eccentric and much-loved paint names are apparently not “vegan friendly”. Peta called for the firm to “update” the names of colours that it said “normalise the exploitation of animals”, such as Dead Salmon, Smoked Trout and Potted Shrimp. The animal rights group suggested changing the colour Skimmed Milk White to Oat Milk and Dorset Cream to Dorset Vegan Cream. Elephant’s Breath and Mouse’s Back are apparently safe. For now.

Hero
Cliff Romme, a 77-year-old amateur golfer from Arizona who hit two holes-in-one in a single round in January. America’s National Hole-in-One Registry says the odds of doing so are around 67 million-to-one.

Hero
Hugh Grant, for telling an interviewer his idea of bliss is “drinking London Pride while munching Twiglets and reading about Colin Firth having a critical and box office failure”. Finally, says Camilla Long in The Sunday Times, a public figure who’s willing to say something fun. Celebrities should have two jobs: “look beautiful and be hilariously rude”.

Heroes
Local councillors in Cork, who voted in October to ban Benjamin Netanyahu from entering their city. It’s not clear whether the Israeli PM ever had plans to visit Ireland’s second-largest city, says Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph, “or indeed whether he has ever heard of it”. And some might argue that the job of local councillors is to fix potholes and organise bin collections, not to “issue futile pronouncements on foreign conflicts taking place over 3,000 miles away”. Still, I’m sure Netanyahu was left reeling.

Villain
Cricket, according to Jonathan Agnew, who isn’t a fan of the sport’s switch to gender-neutral terminology. “I always call a woman batsman a ‘batter’,” he told an interviewer in April, after announcing his retirement as the BBC’s chief cricket correspondent. “But why can’t a man playing a man’s game be a ‘batsman’?” Agnew made the same complaint about the Ashes – a name that emerged from the 1882-3 series between the England and Australia men’s teams – being renamed the “Men’s Ashes”. “It’s an event. It happened. It’s not the ‘Men’s Battle of Hastings’, is it?”

Hero
A small mouse in Wales that tidied up a man’s shed almost every night for two months. The rigorous rodent gathered up items including clothes pegs, corks, nuts and bolts, and dropped them into a tray. “I couldn’t believe it,” says retired postman Rodney Holbrook, who set up a night vision camera to catch the miniature maid in action. “I call him Welsh Tidy Mouse.”

Heroes
JP Morgan, for capping the amount of work its junior bankers can do at 80 hours a week. That still means working, say, six days a week from around 8.30am to 10pm, says The Wall Street Journal, and the bank plans to “make exceptions” when staff are working on live deals. But these young masters of the universe already have it pretty easy: they are forbidden from working between 6pm Friday and noon Saturday, and guaranteed a full weekend off once every three months. Slackers.

Villain
Pope Francis, for allegedly repeating a homophobic slur just weeks after apologising for using it a previous time. Speaking to 200 young priests in June about the number of gay clerics at the Vatican, the pontiff reportedly claimed there was an atmosphere of frociaggine, or “faggotry” – the same word he used in a private discussion the month before. His Holiness also got in trouble for saying men have to do the talking because “we wear the trousers”.

Heroes
The family of Alain Delon, for refusing to honour his dying wish to be buried with his faithful – and very much still living – dog, Loubo. The legendary French actor, who died in August and claimed to have had more than 50 dogs in his lifetime, asked that upon his death his 10-year-old Belgian malinois be humanely killed and lain alongside him in his village cemetery. Delon’s daughter Anouchka assured concerned fans that Loubo would live with her instead.

Villain
The New York Times, for continuing to be utterly clueless about life in Britain. In a correction under a report on the Emmys in September, the newspaper apologised for misidentifying the accessory Scottish actor Richard Gadd wore with his national dress. “It was a sporran, a pouch traditionally worn with a kilt,” they clarified. “Not a fanny pack.”

Villain
Emily in Paris star Lucas Bravo, who briefly decided he was above the Netflix show that made him rich and famous. The French actor agreed to return for series five in November, having initially said he was on the fence because it took too long to shoot, he found the plot “archaic”, and the makers wouldn’t let his chef character open a vegan restaurant in line with his own values. It’s at moments like this, says Giles Coren in The Times, that you want to sit an actor down and say: “Lucas, mate, just say the lines on that bit of paper and f*** off.”

Hero
Hadrian’s Wall, which English Heritage has declared a “gay icon”. It’s part of a long tradition, says Paul Clements in The Independent. Back when I edited the sadly defunct Pink Paper, we had great fun declaring that a new breakfast cereal or the game of rounders was a “queer icon”. But even I draw the line somewhere. Yes, the Emperor Hadrian had boyfriends as well as a wife, but a sandstone wall along the northernmost outpost of the Roman empire isn’t quite the “gay day out” English Heritage imagines. “I’m no Mary Beard but I suspect Hadrian’s Wall was primarily a defensive barrier.”

Hero
Rosie Duffield, who resigned the Labour whip in September with a letter accusing Keir Starmer of presiding over unprecedented “sleaze, nepotism and apparent avarice”. Her departure is a “grave loss” to the PM, says Rod Liddle in The Spectator, as it reduces the number of his MPs who can identify what a “woman” is by about 30%. When asked the question himself, Starmer will no longer be able to wheel out Duffield and say: “Ask her, she seems to know. I haven’t a clue. I have been shown diagrams, of course, many of them in full colour. But a proper definition still eludes me because, for me and the vast majority of my colleagues on the left, such things as diagrams and scientific facts are easily trumped by the post-truth wish-fulfilment pleading of shrill lunatics.”