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👋 Good morning Early Liners! Welcome to the final edition of 2025.

This is the 301st Early Line (and Party Line) this year: it’s been running six days a week since January 6 2025.

In total I’ve tapped out just shy of half a million words in my 5am to 7am sprints, not all of which were mis-spelt. They’ve reached thousands of you: mostly in the UK (66%) but with a sizeable minority in the US (30.7%) and 0.7% of you in Spain, lucky souls. (12 editions were written in Spain, as it happens).

It’s been an extraordinary privilege, no small responsibility, and also great fun to brief you each morning on what’s going on in Scotland, the UK and the world, and try to offer a no-hysteria view of what it might all mean.

Thank you to everyone who has made it such an extraordinary year: to you for signing up, and especially those who stepped up for a paid subscription to support this fledgling micro media business. Thanks to everyone who engaged - even if to disagree with one of my takes. And thank you to everyone who shared it with a friend: you helped this newsletter fly around the world.

Now I need a break. Unless some earth-shattering event shakes me from the turkey coma into which I plan to descend, The Early Line will return on Monday, 5 January 2026.

Merry Christmas, everyone, and a very Happy New Year to you. See you on the other side, to see what 2026 might bring.

Neil Mc xx

📣 Details of the Bondi Beach Hanukkah attack have emerged, a week on from the massacre. The gunmen who allegedly carried out the attack, in which 15 people died, threw four undetonated bombs at the start of the attack, Australian police claim.

Their newly-released documentation also claims the father-and-son gunmen “meticulously planned this terrorist attack for many months”. Naveed Akram, 24, was released from hospital today and transferred to a prison to await trial. (BBC)

• Massacre dad unmasked (Mail)

📣 There’s fresh controversy over the release of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein: one particularly controversial image, “image 468”, which included a photograph of Donald Trump with his arms around a group of young women, disappeared from the Justice Department website before being reinstated last night. (🎁 New York Times - gift link)

• Trump administration officials insisted the decision to release only a fraction of the files mandated by a Congressional deadline was necessary to protect victims. (AP)

• Sex toys and shotguns: what happened when Andrew invited Epstein shooting at Sandringham (🎁 Telegraph - gift link)

📣 Labour MSP Pam Duncan-Glancy will quit Holyrood after a row about her continued friendship with a convicted sex offender. She will not contest next May’s election after party leader Anas Sarwar effectively issued her an ultimatum to end the friendship with Sean Morton, a lifelong friend who admitted possessing indecent images in 2017. (The Daily Record has the exclusive)

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AROUND SCOTLAND

📣 A woman who had the wrong body part removed by a disgraced surgeon is to lodge a complaint with police today after NHS Tayside destroyed evidence needed for a public inquiry. (Sky News)

📣 Two men have been arrested after cocaine and heroin worth £10 million were found in a police raid in Shettleston, Glasgow. (STV)

📣 Holyrood’s finance committee says public inquiries should have set budgets and timeframes, with existing inquiries “over-stretched and poorly-defined”. The total bill for inquiries since 2007 now stands at £260 million. (BBC)

AROUND THE UK & WORLD

📣 Intelligence services say Russia is developing a new anti-satellite weapon to target Elon Musk’s Starling constellation. (AP)

📣 Why are Britain’s railways so often in chaos over the Christmas holidays? A BBC long read explains that 5% of the rail network will be shut down for repairs. Check before you book that journey… (BBC) (Network Rail’s planned engineering pages)

📣 The UK government has no coherent plan to tackle inequality, the “defining social mobility challenge of our generation,” according to the Social Mobility Commission’s chair. (Guardian)

📣 Two Palestine Action-affiliated prisoners taking part in a hunger strike have been taken to hospital, as their supporters called for government intervention in their cases. (Guardian)

📣 An end to puppy farming and a ban on electric shock dog collars are being promised as part of a new animal welfare strategy being launched today. (BBC)

SPORT

⚽️ Hearts reinforced their title credentials with a convincing win over Rangers at Tynecastle, notching up their fourth win against the Old Firm clubs this season - the first time that’s happened since 1985. Derek McInnes will struggle to tamp down expectations, now - and even he said he “expected” his side to win.

• Hearts v Rangers: five talking points (Daily Record) | 🎥 Highlights 

• Hearts "have arrived" as Scottish Premiership title contenders (BBC)

• Once Hearts were a goal ahead there was only going to be one winner (Scotsman)

⚽️ Celtic rolled over Aberdeen in the end, and could have scored many more in a dramatic game at Celtic Park. Not that under-fire manager Wilfried Nancy will be complaining: it was his first win after four defeats in a row.

• Some light amid the darkness for Wilfried Nancy (BBC) | 🎥 Highlights

• Nancy praises his side’s grit and determination (Sun)

• Thelin “so proud” of red-carded Aberdeen defender (Herald)

IDEAS
What we learned over the weekend: Streeting’s not running | Parliament rejects youth suicide plea | Walliams claims | Brain rebooting | Influencers get beaten up

🗣️Health Secretary Wes Streeting went for a walk with The Observer’s Rachel Sylvester, and appeared to spend much of it insisting he doesn’t want to be the next Prime Minister. At least, he does… just not soon. And he’s not pitching for it.

But he also talks about the (English) resident doctors’ strike, young people’s mental health and the weaponisation of Christianity by the far right. “The idea that you’ve got people like Tommy Robinson running around trying to make themselves out to be martyrs of Christian persecution, it’s such bollocks,” he says. (The Observer £)

🗣️ The Scottish Parliament rejected a petition calling for mandatory suicide awareness and prevention education for high school pupils in Scotland, as already exists in England.

Grieving parents were left angered by the decision, warning the ongoing epidemic of tragedies - suicide is the biggest cause of death among young people in Scotland - would continue without concerted action.

Holyrood’s Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee was the body that dismissed the petition, with Chair Jackson Carlaw MSP emailing campaigners to say: "The Committee agreed to close your petition on the basis that there is no mandatory curriculum in Scotland."

He added that Health and Wellbeing is already one of eight curricular areas and one of three “Responsibilities of All.” (Daily Record)

🗣️Entertainer and author David Walliams has faced a weekend of claims - which he denies - about his inappropriate behaviour towards young women. His publisher, HarperCollins, dropped him on Friday after a Telegraph investigation. He’d already lost his work judging on Britain’s Got Talent after some richly unpleasant comments about contestants were picked up by microphones. Now, says the title, his career “hangs in the balance”. (🎁 Telegraph - gift link)

🗣️We learned that our brains reboot at four key moments: rather than develop in a linear way, there are four bursts of more profound change in our brains. That means childhood lasts until 9, adolescence which lasts until 32, adulthood until 66, early ageing to 83 and then late ageing for the remainder of your life.

The Sunday Times spoke to four people at those stages of transition: all are quite healthy and apparently happy, but the older ones are a bit more… what’s the word? Forgetful. (Sunday Times £)

🗣️ YouTube influencer Jake Paul got his jaw broken in two places by Anthony Joshua in the wee hours of Saturday morning. But at least he was able to console himself with his share of a £140 million purse as he flew home in his private jet, along with the knowledge that he’d been badly beaten up by an actual boxer.

Andrew Tate, the self-described misogynist, also retreated from a boxing ring badly beaten up after losing his comeback fight on Saturday. Only he would describe himself as a fighter - and, embarrassingly, he lost his bout to a reality TV star, Chase DeMoor.

And Tate has to be cautious about where he goes next: he and his brother face 21 charges in the UK, including rape, assault, human trafficking and controlling prostitution. They are facing trial in Romania, first, for rape and human trafficking.

There are now calls for the Tate brothers to be extradited to the UK, so they can’t continue to gallivant around the world, although more than a few say watching Tate senior lose badly in the ring is, in a dark sense, quite therapeutic. (Independent)

👍 That’s your Early Line for the day

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