After blows in mid-season the British driver rallied to hold off the challenge of his teammate Oscar Piastri and a stunning late run from Max Verstappen to make history in Abu Dhabi

“Just want to go have a burger and go home,” was the disconsolate entreaty from Lando Norris when he felt his Formula One world championship hopes had taken a mortal blow after he failed to finish at the Dutch Grand Prix in August. Yet it was testament to the resolution he has shown all season that while down he was far from out, as he proved in going on to claim the title that he felt had slipped away.

When Norris took the world championship with his third‑place finish in Abu Dhabi on Sunday he became the first British champion since Lewis Hamilton took his last title in 2020 and, similar to Hamilton for his first win in 2008, he had to show his absolute determination to close it out after a rollercoaster ride for the 26-year-old.

Thankfully, we now know more about conditions such as autism and ADHD. The health secretary must not be part of this attempt to turn back the clock

Wes Streeting is a politician whose keen interest in the zeitgeist is only matched by his seeming drive to be as close to the heart of it as possible. It is, therefore, not much of a surprise that the secretary of state for health and social care should end the year by announcing what the official blurb calls an “independent review into mental health conditions, ADHD and autism”. Many of the resulting headlines put it more pithily: in keeping with an increasingly deafening media din, this will seemingly be an investigation into “overdiagnosis”.

Candidates for 2025’s word of the year have so far included “rage bait” and “parasocial”, but overdiagnosis is surely the term that perfectly captures the intellectual and political fashions of the past 12 months. The mess of ideas it crystallises now has a set text, published back in March: The Age Of Diagnosis by the neurologist and epilepsy expert Dr Suzanne O’Sullivan. Having been pronounced on, with his usual belligerent ignorance, by Nigel Farage, overdiagnosis has become an obsession of the Reform UK deputy leader Richard Tice, who now holds forth about why some children with special educational needs shouldn’t be entitled to dedicated school transport, and claims that the sight of kids with sensory issues wearing ear defenders at school is “insane”.

John Harris is a Guardian columnist. His book Maybe I’m Amazed: A Story of Love and Connection in Ten Songs is available from the Guardian bookshop

Parcels worth £666.5m have been stolen in the UK this year, though some pranksters have found ways to give culprits their comeuppance. With Christmas deliveries arriving thick and fast, here are practical steps to take

A couple of years ago, 31-year-old charity worker Nicki Wedgwood had ordered Christmas presents online for friends and family. When the packages were delivered to her in Hackney, east London, the driver left them in the lobby of her building rather than taking them directly to her flat. She spotted them as she popped out to a nearby shop and decided to pick them up when she came back. When she returned 10 minutes later, the boxes had been ripped open and their contents were gone.

Wedgwood thinks she passed the thief in the hallway as she was leaving for the shop. “There was some random dude just inside the doorway, who had a Boris bike with him,” she says. She had assumed he was a guest of one of her neighbours. “I said hello to him … I think he even said Merry Christmas.”

This year’s most-wanted ornaments include weight-loss syringes and favourite foodstuffs. When and why did Christmas trees become so commercialised?

it was the second Tuesday in November but Christmas was already in crisis. Sarah Gibbons had just received a shipment of baubles at her Glasgow homeware shop, Modern Love Store, and some crucial ornaments were missing. She hopped on a long-distance phone call to her suppliers in the US – she needed to sort this out. After all, her customers were clamouring for them. “People aren’t just buying one,” the 39-year-old shopkeeper told me after discovering the missing decorations, “they’re buying three or four at a time.” Three what? Turtle doves? Nutcrackers? Or perhaps some classic candy canes? Of course not. This year’s must-have bauble is in the shape of a lightly glittered syringe of Ozempic.

Growing up, my favourite Christmas ornament was a little pink plastic baby Jesus resting in a manger. He was bought by my great-aunt in Oberammergau, Germany, in 1990 – and although his battery hasn’t been changed since, you can still press his belly to hear Silent Night play. Today, decorations are a little different. Ozempic isn’t the only needle hanging from our needles: Britons can also purchase Christmas tree ornaments shaped like syringes of Botox and filler. Meanwhile, Selfridges is selling a dirty martini bauble, M&S is peddling a hanging prawn cocktail and Aldi is offering an ornament shaped like an air fryer. Move over, baby Jesus; glass has now been blown into the likeness of Harry Styles, Taylor Swift and The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White.

Powerful Christian figures are emerging in Britain but there are important differences from the US, where evangelism has fuelled Trump

At recent Reform UK press conferences, two very distinctive heads can often be spotted in the front row: the near-white locks of Danny Kruger, the party’s head of policy, and the swept-back blond mane of James Orr, now a senior adviser to Nigel Farage.

As well as guiding the policy programme for what could be the UK’s next government, the pair have something else in common. Both are highly devout Christians who came to religion in adulthood and have trenchant views on social issues such as abortion and the family.

If Monopoly is your festive fallback for family fun then go directly to Jail and do not pass Go. A new wave of party pleasers, trick takers and strategy games can transport you to Stalingrad, the spirit realm, or even Georgian sex venues

There was a time when playing a Christmas board game meant dusting off an old favourite selected from a narrow range of options. Maybe Trivial Pursuit, if you wanted to show off your pub quiz chops. Or Scrabble, if you felt like flexing your wordsmith muscles. Or Monopoly, if you hoped to roll around in wads of fake cash. But these days the choice is far, far wider. Almost overwhelmingly so.

During the past decade, the modern board game scene has exploded like a cartoon kitten. As screens have come to dominate our eyelines and erode our mental health, more of us are seeking recreational solace in the more social, less toxic worlds of cardboard, cubes and wooden pawns – or “meeples”, to use the hobby parlance. Each tabletop experience has been finely crafted to yield maximum enjoyment in an often gorgeously presented way. Taking their cue from such indefatigable “Eurogame” classics as Catan and Codenames, these modern games have so grown in popularity they’ve encouraged the spread of high-street board game cafes, fuelled a boom in tabletop-related influencer activity, filled convention halls at ever-growing expos worldwide and raised millions on crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter.

Exclusive: Watchdog finds 14% of cases not put on hospital waiting lists, with many reporting worsening health and rising anxiety

One in seven people in England who need hospital care are not receiving it because their GP referral is lost, rejected or delayed, the NHS’s patient watchdog has found.

Three-quarters (75%) of those trapped in this “referrals black hole” suffer harm to their physical or mental health as a result of not being added to the waiting list for tests or treatment.

Moscow welcomes White House document critical of the EU as talks to end the Ukraine war enter a key phase

The Kremlin has heaped praise on Donald Trump’s latest national security strategy, calling it an encouraging change of policy that largely aligns with Russian thinking.

The remarks follow the publication of a White House document on Friday that criticises the EU and says Europe is at risk of “civilisational erasure”, while making clear the US is keen to establish better relations with Russia.

• Reporters and photographers barred from Amex Stadium

• Guardian says reporting is in the public interest

Brighton & Hove Albion have banned the Guardian’s reporters and photographers from attending matches at the Amex Stadium after it reported on allegations relating to the Premier League club’s owner, Tony Bloom.

The club notified the Guardian on Sunday to say it felt it “would be inappropriate for journalists and photographers from the Guardian to be accredited to matches at the Amex, starting from Sunday’s game against West Ham”. The move follows reports in the Guardian that have raised questions from MPs about the activities of Bloom, a billionaire who has made his money from gambling.

• Norris is 11th Briton to win title after, tense third place

• Max Verstappen second in title race, Oscar Piastri third

In tears and almost rendered speechless by the sheer weight of emotion, what winning his debut Formula One world championship meant to Lando Norris was writ large across every inch of his face. What had begun as a childhood dream and at one point this season had seemingly slipped from his grasp was, finally, a reality he clearly found hard to take in, as he sealed it with third place at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.

It would have taken truly a heart of stone not to have been moved by it all as he secured the title after what has been an enormously hard‑fought season across 24 gruelling races that went to the wire at the Yas Marina Circuit.