Yesterday never dies

James Bond is dead. Not only on screen—although the last of the Daniel Craig outings, No Time to Die, was indeed a weepie that killed him—but the character himself is now a perfectly lacquered fossil: aesthetically pleasing in a showcase, but dead as disco, and flagged with cautionary labels for young, impressionable visitors.

- RAJA SEN

007, for all his glory, is incapable of actually evolving, and to drag James into 2025 appears not merely futile, but a little uncouth. Placing a trigger-warning on a man licensed to kill is like driving an Aston Martin to a vegan food-truck.

Thus I urge Amazon, the new owners of the franchise, not to cast a new Bond. The best one-liners have long since detonated, the martinis have been shaken. What remains is a genteel spectre, smelling of aftershave and anachronism. "He manages to combine uniquely, I think, violence and sexism with a sort of weird camp fussiness about everything he eats and drinks and does," Victoria Coren Mitchell brilliantly ranted on Room 101, "and yet women are supposed to find him irresistible because he has special pens."

Brutally speaking, Bond is too toxic to live amongst us, and too iconic to kill off entirely. Who, then, should play him? Here is my bulletproof, gold-fingered argument: Nobody. (Insert Monty Norman's theme music in your head as you read ahead.) There is only one who always ran while the others walked. I say let Bond be played, henceforth and forever, by the one and only Sean Connery, resurrected by the necromancy of AI and the black magic of deepfakes.

If cultural baton-passing is inevitable, then surely the only safe hands belong to a digital ghost. Why not give the role to the original, and still the supreme, Commander Bond?