Monday

A man dies on the sidewalk at the hands of a masked gunman and much of the commentary around it is unsympathetic. While details of the killing of Brian Thompson on a Manhattan street this week are still emerging, the assumption is that his murder relates to his profession, one of loathing in the United States: head of one the largest and, by some accounts, meanest health insurers in the country.

Thompson’s take home pay last year was reportedly in the region of $10m (£8m) Meanwhile United Healthcare, which is being investigated by the Department of Justice for anti-trust violations and was subject to fierce protests over the summer from policyholders accusing it of refusing their care or turning down their claims, generates revenues of $450bn a year.

One of the accusations made against United Healthcare is that it used AI algorithms to override doctors’ recommendations and deny nursing care to elderly policyholders. A class-action lawsuit was filed against it in 2023, accompanying the class-action suit filed against one of its rival insurers, Cigna, for allegedly using algorithms rather than doctors to review and automatically deny 300,000 claims. Every year, Americans spend a huge proportion of their salaries on health insurance that often leaves them still in medical debt when the insurers wriggle out of their claims.

After Thompson, 50, was gunned down at 6.45am outside the Hilton Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, the debate online was swift, brutal and characterised by armchair weapons experts confidently sharing opinions on models of silencer and bandying around terms like “asset”. A dispiriting spectacle all round.

Tuesday

Since King Charles returned from his official tour of Australia in October he has appeared in public looking very jolly indeed. This week, on an impromptu walkabout in Notting Hill, west London, he could be overheard treating stunned American tourists to some top-level royal bantz that included the lines, “You’re not getting too wet are you?!”, “Are you having an enjoyable time in London?,” and “Texas? I don’t believe it!” God bless you, sir!

Let’s hope the starstruck tourists go some way towards making up for any disappointment felt by the king at bad news this week about the royal portrait, copies of which were made available after the coronation for any public institution that wanted one. The photo of the king, pictured in full admiral of the fleet uniform, would, it was hoped, grace every school, hospital and police station wall in the land, as portraits of his mother had done in times of yore.

Alas, newly released figures from the Cabinet Office reveal that of the nation’s 1,454 hospitals, only 40 have opted to have King Charles III as part of their visitor experience. And while a quarter of all Church of England churches accepted the monarch’s kind offer, only 7.4% of universities felt the same way. Still, 100% of coastguard services opted in, presumably because of the naval connection, and numbers are still pending on uptake from the Aussies, New Zealanders and Canadians, to whom the A3-size, oak-framed copy was made available on the condition they paid for the postage.

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Wednesday

Talking to Katie Razzall in a BBC interview this week, Anna Wintour, bent almost sideways at the affront of having to engage with a hack, explained that she wears sunglasses indoors all the time because, “they help me see, and help me not see. They help me be seen and not be seen.” It could be a poem by Eric Cantona, or lines from a first-person piece written by Gwyneth Paltrow for Vogue, or perhaps, in Wintour’s mind, a shot at whimsy.

As the fashion queen is aware, however, the sunglasses also help with her apparently career-long project of unsettling, one-upping and screening herself off from any given interlocutor, for reasons one can only guess at, although the root cause of such cartoonish rudeness tends either to be arrogance, inadequacy, or both. The irony, at this stage, is not only how enduringly charmless the effect of Wintour’s sunglasses are, but how a statement more commonly associated with the babyish sartorial crutch of a two-bit warlord continues to be indulged and misread as iconic.

Thursday

Taste-maker and entrepreneur, Brooklyn Beckham, is working in Mexico as a result of which, his wife has revealed, the couple spends up to nine hours at a stretch on FaceTime calls. Sharing their call logs on her Instagram, Nicola Peltz Beckham reveals not only that Beckham, 25, is saved in her phone as “Brooklyn my husband”, but that the pair keep an open channel running overnight while cruel fate keeps them apart.

“Who else sleeps on FaceTime when their best friend travels?’ writes Peltz Beckham, sharing a photo of her husband grinning and sporting his new pencil moustache. Beckham is in Mexico to promote his new hot sauce, Cloud23, which one hopes is the first in a long series in which the oldest Beckham child travels to far flung parts of the world to explain the local cuisine to the people who live there.

Friday

What a sartorial journey life is turning out to be for Daniel Craig, actor and aspiring style icon, this week appearing in the New York Times as one of the 63 most stylish people of 2024. Craig, who has moved on from the fashion straightjacket of James Bond, is pictured in his new guise as a 56-year-old man who has hired a new stylist, while promoting what the Times calls his “gritty romantic drama ‘Queer’.” Hmmm. I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that Craig’s new look – hip-hop pants, loud-print sweaters, Hunter S Thompson yellow shades and the occasional ratty neck scarf – is less fashion statement than fancy dress, and we’d all be happier if he returned to Savile Row.

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