No, there’s nothing strange about the brightest and best celebrating Christmas together. As I recall, that’s very much the meaning of Christmas.

BAZAKE'S resident enfant terrible talks Christmas parties and boisterous badinage

OPINION

Aulden Juan-Cragg

3/23/20223 min read

I see the peanut gallery are wagging their crusty fingers over innocent enjoyment again. What’s new? I do wonder what it is societies’ upper crust are expected to do at Christmas but rub shoulders. If anything we should be encouraged, for the good of society. There’s no limit to what a guestlist like that could achieve.

I suppose if the hard left had their way we’d all be choking down on state-issued nut roasts the size, shape and consistency of a coaster and watching the royal family being executed on our “free” internet.

I think I’d rather be sipping expensive wine and reminiscing with an entire galaxy of entertainers, regardless of how “suspicious” the host might be considered among jealous, bloodthirsty communists.

Giles Coren, a lifelong friend and godfather to my estranged daughter, and I have developed something of a reputation as a double act at the annual Lebedev Christmas bash. Neither of us bring our ghastly children or wives and we allow what little hair we have left to cascade. It has been said, on more than one occasion, that we are both the life and the soul of the party.

The Lebedev Christmas party is our chance to relive the bohemian excesses of our youth and bask a little in the company of fellow tastemakers, mover-shakers and policy makers. Having both spent almost an entire year managing not to jab unsatisfactory service staff with knives and choking down inadequate restaurant meals, I’m sure readers will appreciate how important it is to spend time with people one can have a sophisticated discussion with, where I don’t need to raise my voice, talk slowly and point to make myself understood.

One year, myself and Giles got roaring drunk on a world-class Novy Svet before scandalising and delighting our fellow revellers, in equal measure, with a rather vigorous (simulated) sex act on a young South Russian Ovcharka. I took the front, where Giles insisted on the rear. As I recall, we did rather an excellent job of synchronising our (simulated) climaxes, having thrusted for several minutes so as to demonstrate our prowess to any potential partners. Anthony Worral-Thompson came perilously close to rupturing an artery and vomiting from convulsive mirth. It was from the back of that performance that we were invited to his villa in Tuscany, where he drunkenly served us undercooked chicken and fell asleep at 5pm.

During our second reprise we were begged to stop by some dishevelled Animal Liberation Front hag, who insisted we were “distressing” the animal. “So f*cking what, you hairy, grunting old b*tch” I recall Giles told her, before launching into so wonderfully lurid and graphic a threat that I wouldn’t dare repeat it in print, though I can promise you it put that silly peacenik in her place. What she was doing there in the first place is anyone’s guess, though I think I speak for everyone in attendance when I say her storming off tearfully was supremely entertaining.

It seems the objections to Lebedev’s party boil down, as always, to jealousy. “God I wish I could spend Christmas with Giles Coren, and Alexander Armstrong, and Jonathan Ross..” they mutter to themselves, faces contorted in a painful, grinchly sneer as they nibble at their Ritz cracker and Basics hummus. “Instead of here in the cramped, dusty shack that my family have been squatting in since 6 Grannies ago. In fact, I wish Christmas was banned altogether and replaced with a parade on Lenin’s birthday.”

Well, tough. As far as the situation around Lebedev is concerned, everyone is a threat to someone’s security in today’s world; and I note with some satisfaction that the left and the British intelligence services aren’t even pretending not to be on the same page. Make of that what you will.

So let them press their bulbous, greasy noses against the proverbial window as their betters make merry. Let them shiver away in the thin, rough cloth of their jealousy, and let the moisture from their stinking breath cloud the windows and spare us the obsidian gaze of their piggy eyes, that stare with barely understood envy and primordial loathing.