News from Nowhere: An Impossible Year

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2022 wasn’t the year that many in the UK had hoped and expected it to be. The promised economic, cultural, social, and political bounce-back from the Covid-19 crisis never really got off the ground. The lingering effects of Brexit and the shock of the outbreak of war in Europe pushed the country slowly back towards the twin threats of inflation and recession. The chaos that has simultaneously overwhelmed the country’s governing party has hardly helped.

For this is the year that Britain saw three Prime Ministers, four Chancellors, four Home Secretaries (including the return of one), four Health Secretaries (including the return of another one), and five Secretaries of State for Education (one of whom quit after two days in office). It is the year in which the inappropriately named James Cleverly went from being a relatively obscure Foreign Office minister to Education Secretary and then to Foreign Secretary. It was the year in which Grant Shapps held the job of Home Secretary for six days, and Liz Truss, at seven weeks, became the shortest-lived Prime Minister in the nation’s history.

Her Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng had remained in post for the briefest period of any Chancellor who’d not died on the job. Last month, Mr. Kwarteng admitted that he’d got ‘carried away’ with his fiscal reform plans. There are those in the Treasury who wish he had been, along with his plans, in a sack.

Kwarteng and Truss had, after all, attempted the foolhardiest experiment in supply-side economics since that time, quite a while ago, when the extraordinary talents of a young man from Nazareth caused wild fluctuations in the price of fish. Their plan to boost the economy resoundingly crashed the economy. It wouldn’t have been so bad if pretty much everyone else hadn’t told them in advance that it inevitably would, but pretty much everyone had, and it did.

It has been a year of unprecedented upheavals, disasters, and disappointments. The joy of seeing the ‘Lionesses’ win the Euros in July was for many dispelled when last month England’s men’s team crashed out of the quarterfinals of the World Cup. If the women’s victory against Germany recalled the glories of the Second World War, then Harry Kane’s ignoble defeat by France reversed the triumphs at Waterloo and Agincourt and took the nation all the way back to Hastings in 1066. 

That was 2022 all over. A year of ups and downs, but for every up, a dozen downs. The sigh of relief provoked by Boris Johnson’s eventual removal from office was quickly countered by the grim reality of Liz Truss’s catastrophic stint in Downing Street. 

The day after the country saw its first black Doctor Who, it also welcomed its first person of colour as Prime Minister. Yet at the same time, the UK continued to witness high-profile cases of racial abuse and prejudice, not least amongst members of key emergency services and even in the hallowed halls of Buckingham Palace itself.

It was also of course the year during which the UK’s longest-serving and much-loved monarch celebrated the seventieth anniversary of her accession to the throne, and, a few months later, died.

Then, last month, the popularity of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex plummeted to new lows following the release of their self-promoting, sanctimonious Netflix whinge-fest. At the same time, the independent press regulator received an unprecedented number of public complaints (exceeding the total number it had received throughout the previous year) when a controversial television presenter wrote in a tabloid newspaper that we wanted to see Meghan punished by being paraded naked through the streets and having dung flung at her. 

He had announced that he hated the Duchess of Sussex, and that he also hated the First Minister of Scotland, who also happened to be a woman. Even his own daughter condemned the man’s vile misogyny. 

Of course, in doing so, he managed to provide conclusive evidence for Meghan and Harry’s complaints of unfair treatment at the hands of the British media, and therefore did them something of a favour.

Unfortunately, the formerly royal couple failed to capitalize on this advantage and instead, rather than taking the moral higher ground, continued to bleat that the paper’s apology for its columnist’s poor apology was ‘nothing more than a PR stunt’.

Well, we all thought, they should know all about that kind of thing. Every fibre of every sensible person’s being cried out to them to stop complaining. Their point had been made. That should have been enough.

And so, even at the moment that they won their argument, they lost it.

2022 was replete with such absurdities. It was certainly a funny kind of a year.

Last month also saw extraordinary breakthroughs in genetic medicine and nuclear fusion, even as nurses across most of the country went on strike for the first time in the history of the UK’s National Health Service, and millions of families in the world’s sixth-largest economy struggled through arctic temperatures because they were unable to afford to heat their homes.

It was a year of contradictions, a year of paradox. A year that made history for all the wrong reasons. A year we’ll never forget, although many may well wish to. A year from which almost everyone in Britain should feel relieved to move on.

We’ll never look upon its like again. Let’s hope not anyway.