So, that was 2021. ‘Another year over,’ sang John Lennon, ‘and a new one just begun.’ That much is self-evident. ‘Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over,’ T. S. Eliot once wrote. That certainly seems more pertinent to 2021.

If 2020 was the year of the virus, then 2021 was, for those sufficiently privileged to receive it, the year of the vaccine. It was the year in which much of the world started to learn how to live with the fact of a future which will for all our lifetimes continue to feel the presence of Covid-19.

It was also the year in which Britain hosted a critical climate conference that never really achieved what was so urgently needed. This was in part perhaps because the host government, though so busy demanding ambitious environmental pledges from other nations, had in recent months developed an international reputation for failing to deliver on its own promises. In centuries to come, historians may look back upon COP26 in Glasgow as a wasted opportunity to save our planet – if, that is, there are any historians still left alive to do so.

This was a year of stupidly extravagant stunts in space tourism, exorbitant suborbital adventures that reminded the rest of the world how tone-deaf to its troubles some billionaires can be. It was the year of the catastrophic NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan; it was the year of the Taliban. 

Twenty twenty-one was also the year in which an outgoing American president incited a violent insurrection which attempted to overthrow the democratic processes of the United States, and in which an eagerly anticipated new president proved about as exciting as a temazepam crushed into a mug of lukewarm milk – as exhilarating as an Ed Sheeran concert with the sound turned down.

It was a year in which we read a lot in the press about cancel culture, and in which J. K. Rowling’s mildly controversial views about gender rights were therefore said to have resulted in the withdrawal of all her Harry Potter books from publication, the cancellation of her third Fantastic Beasts movie, and the decision by American quidditch leagues to court publicity by discontinuing their unauthorized use of the word ‘quidditch’ in the name of their unsurprisingly overlooked sport. In fact, only the last of those is true; but the media do seem to relish stoking the flames of outrage around this subject.

It was the year in which many developed nations, including the UK, suffered fuel and food supply shortages, unprecedentedly steep rises in energy costs and sharp drops in standards of living. Britain also experienced the death of the royal consort to its queen. Prince Philip gave up the ghost just two months shy of his hundredth birthday. He shuffled off this mortal coil in the midst of ongoing legal controversies relating to his second son’s association with a convicted sex offender, and just a few weeks after one of his grandsons had strongly hinted to Oprah Winfrey that his grandfather was a bit of a racist. In this context, death may have come to the grand old Duke of Edinburgh as something of a relief. 

Regardless of one’s view of the British monarchy, it was nevertheless saddening to see his widow, a venerable but vulnerable old lady sat alone at his socially distanced funeral, a reminder of the frailties of all our loved ones’ lives. Then, in December, it was announced that England’s Queen would again forgo her traditional family Christmas at her country residence in the county of Norfolk, and would be spending the day on her own at Windsor Castle. A few days later, to make matters worse, it was announced that her tiresome oldest son and his horsey second wife would be joining her. Then, on Christmas morning itself, a madman armed with a crossbow was discovered in the grounds of her home, apparently set upon killing her. It had not been Her Majesty’s greatest of years.

As the months rolled on, the British Conservative Party also experienced its own version of that royal ‘annus horribilis’ as a series of revelations concerning both incompetence and sleaze unfolded across the media. These included allegations that a number of its MPs had exploited their parliamentary positions to promote their own financial interests, as well as claims relating to the Foreign Secretary’s failure to engage properly with his duties while on holiday during the Afghan crisis, and an incident in which the Health Secretary was caught on film breaking his own coronavirus rules (and his marital vows) in an amorous embrace with a colleague. The parliamentary standards watchdog opened investigations into the conduct of (among others) both the Leader of the House of Commons and the Leader of the Scottish Conservative Party. One MP resigned, the Health Secretary resigned, and the Foreign Secretary was made Deputy Prime Minister.

And then, of course, to top it all, the country had to endure its leader’s increasingly eccentric and inane shenanigans. There were ongoing irregularities in his reporting of certain financial arrangements, including payments received to cover the redecoration of his Downing Street residence. There were his attempts to pressure his MPs to change the protocols on parliamentary standards in a bid to prevent the suspension of one of those MPs, a subsequent by-election and a minor piece of political embarrassment. Those attempts resulted in an inevitable volte-face, the resignation of that MP, a humiliating by-election defeat and much greater public embarrassment. And, of course, there was his insanely rambling speech to business leaders about his admiration for a cartoon pig. 

This is a man whose relationship with the truth is more distant than Meghan’s with Kate, a moral incontinent who has turned verbal flatulence into a way of life, an art form and a mode of government. The year ended in a spectacularly predictable fashion, with Boris Johnson bending the truth in ways which stretched to breaking point even the credulity of his most ardent supporters, in response to press revelations as to a series of government parties which had taken place the previous Christmas in breach of his government’s own Covid regulations. 

It had been reported that unlawful festivities had taken place in Downing Street, in ministries and at the Conservative Party’s headquarters. Film footage also emerged of the premier’s press team and the Leader of the House of Commons making jokes about the whole shameful situation. London’s Metropolitan Police were eventually obliged to refer themselves for investigation to the Independent Office for Police Conduct and to the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime over allegations of their own complicity in these breaches. The situation grew so convoluted that one almost expected the Police Commissioner to arrest herself. 

The Prime Minister initially denied any such parties had taken place, and then (once proofs were found that these parties had indeed taken place) he denied that any rules had been broken. An image soon surfaced of him hosting a quiz night in Downing Street. A few days later, as absurdities piled upon absurdities, it was reported that the top civil servant heading the government inquiry into these illicit parties had himself hosted a Christmas party for his own staff. Shortly thereafter, a photo appeared of Boris Johnson, his wife and seventeen colleagues enjoying cheese and wine in his garden during the lockdown of May 2020. A spokesperson for the Prime Minister said that the event had been a work meeting. Mr. Johnson himself later added that ‘those were people at work’. Asked whether he and his colleagues should have been drinking wine whilst working, he insisted that he had said all that he had to say on the subject. 

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By this point, the government appeared bizarrely determined to morph into a grotesque caricature of itself. Political satirists across the country must have despaired, as there was little more that they could say to ridicule Mr. Johnson’s administration than what that administration was already saying and doing. This was a government in freefall. This was a political implosion in agonisingly slow motion.

During December, ninety-nine of his own MPs voted against the Prime Minister’s measures designed to address the threat of the Omicron variant of Covid-19. One of his most trusted allies, the Brexit minister Lord Frost, then resigned in protest against those restrictions. During the immediate run-up to Christmas, new infections in the UK for the first time exceeded 100,000 cases a day; and, with his Cabinet split and his authority in tatters, Boris Johnson was unable to assert any sense of control and to impose upon England the more rigorous responses enacted in the devolved regions of the country. Then, on 27 December, while nightclubs had closed and social distancing had returned in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and as infection rates soared across the UK, Boris Johnson met with his scientific advisers, and, not wanting to be blamed for wrecking the imminent new year celebrations, chose to let England continue unimpeded by further regulations to take its chances alone for the rest of 2021 with the unprecedentedly contagious Omicron strain.

Britain’s year had opened in the chaos caused by its government’s mishandling of the Covid-19 crisis, and it ended in a remarkably similar way. It had begun with the mushrooming threat of the Delta variant; it ended with the growing menace of the Omicron strain. It had started with the UK Prime Minister looking like a bit of an idiot. It ended with the same Prime Minister looking like a lot of an idiot. At least 100 per cent of an idiot, possibly rather more.

Meanwhile, the terminally bland Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition spent much of the last twelve months desperately trying not to say or do anything that might cause the slightest offence (or, for that matter, provoke the mildest interest). In his clear wish to offer himself as an antidote to the ebullient and flamboyant Boris Johnson, Sir Keir Starmer seemed resolved to model himself upon the unassuming figure of one of the British Labour movement’s greatest heroes, Clement Attlee, the Prime Minister who founded the UK’s national health service and welfare state after the Second World War, and about whom it was once famously remarked that, on the occasion of an empty taxi arriving in Downing Street, it was Mr. Attlee who got out. 

While Mr. Starmer busied himself playing a dreadfully misjudged version of Lennon and McCartney’s Nowhere Man, his deputy, by contrast, thought it would be a good idea to call the Tories ‘a bunch of scum’. This was just a few weeks before a popular Conservative politician was murdered by someone who, as it turned out, appeared to agree with her. It had not, in short, been the most edifying period for British politics.

So, what, if anything, have these 365 days of torment and tedium given us? What, if anything at all, has changed? What might we have learned from the omnishambles – the pandemic-infused pandemonium – that was 2021?

As we dive headlong into 2022, it appears we may have been slowly experiencing the entrenchment of the new normal: a blended way of working and of living (at least for those lucky enough to have that option), vacillating between the office and Zoom, between the outside world and the security of home, with the relentless resurgence of increasingly dangerous versions of Covid-19 repeatedly disrupting our various attempts to reconstruct our national economies and our social lives, as the virus tries its damnedest to make a mockery of our ambitions to ‘build back better’ (as that most hackneyed mantra of 2021 would have it).

On 16 December, England’s chief medical officer told a committee of MPs that, as the range of vaccines and treatments continues to develop, the risks will ‘gradually decrease’ in incremental steps of about six months at a time. The most likely best-case scenario might be that we find ourselves in a relatively ‘safer haven’ in future years, when most of the ‘heavy lifting’ in the unremitting battle against Covid-19 should be performed by medical interventions rather than by social restrictions. The future, in other words, may be brighter, but without ever being very likely to become especially bright.

There seems something abominably depressing about this, something quite soul-destroying. During the trials and reversals of 2021, we seem to have shifted away from an initial aspiration to build a better and a fairer world in the aftermath of the Covid crisis, towards a stoical acknowledgement that this pandemic will remain with us, in one form or another, for the rest of our lives, and of our children’s lives, and that the most we might realistically be able to hope for are moments of respite during the warm summer months, when we might meet our friends for a pint of beer or a cup of tea, see a film, a show or a sporting event, or even travel a little, all in the shadow of the knowledge that the cold of winter will all too swiftly come again. For every few steps forward, then, we might optimistically anticipate just slightly fewer steps back.

The fading of our post-pandemic aspirations would, of course, be an awful shame, and a horribly wasted opportunity. This global catastrophe has robbed so many people of their lives and their livelihoods. It has shattered the health and wellbeing of untold millions. And it now also appears to be trying to wither on the vine our ambitions for the enrichment of our societies and the advancement of our civilizations. 

This therefore seems a point at which our species might reasonably now wish to draw the proverbial line in the sand. Thus far but no further, we must insist. In its bid to subvert the spirit of humanity itself, we may assert that Covid-19 has taken a step too far.

So, let us always do our very best to recall, as we struggle on through these darkest hours, what it is that we are struggling for. Let us never give up on our dreams, on the possibility of forms of progress that radically transcend the limitations of our current expectations of our politics and societies. 

The noble impulse to imagine and to demand a better world is famously embodied in such classic works of speculative fiction as Thomas More’s Utopia, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward and William Morris’s News from Nowhere. The prospects upheld by these kinds of utopian fantasy may often tend to follow periods of great crisis – offering the chance to start again and build back better – and these aspirations certainly help to sustain through such catastrophes our faith in the durability of homo sapiens. Our ability to look forward in hope underpins our resilience, our capacity to survive today.

This utopian drive rides a tide of optimism; but, as Edward Bellamy suggested in his novel of 1888, while this ambition may seem utterly fantastical, it is not necessarily entirely nonsensical. There is, said Bellamy, a very actual possibility of transforming the nightmare of history into a bold new reality. Or, as, two years later, William Morris wrote of his own utopian reverie, ‘if others can see it as I have seen it, then it may be called a vision rather than a dream’. That hope is surely something that might be worth holding onto as we continue to navigate our ways through these terribly difficult days. It’s a clanging cliché, I know, but let’s always try to dare to dream. Yet (and indeed because) it’s so easy to fall into not doing so.

Let’s endeavour never to forget that those things which unite us are so much stronger and so much more enduring than those which divide us. And so, Happy New Year, everyone: may it grant us health and happiness, mutual respect and understanding, equity and justice, prosperity and peace. Salaam, shalom, shanti, as T. S. Eliot might rather more optimistically have said.