A lot of us, I feel sure, think we had a hard year of it in 2022. It started badly, then got worse. In early January, the number of deaths worldwide from Covid-19 was reckoned at 5.5 million, with hundreds of thousands more to follow. But the pandemic looked to be on its last legs, which meant, of course, that the recriminations began, with the pro-lockdown, pro-mask lobby forced onto the defensive.
February looked like more of the same until Vladimir Putin fired the starting gun on his threatened invasion of Ukraine, which most of us, the experts included, believed wouldn’t happen or would be over by Easter. We were wrong. Instead, rallied by its remarkable President, the former comedian Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine steadily gained in strength and confidence. Armed by the West but relying first on its own resolve and the heroism of its troops, it began to push back Russia’s ramshackle army.
It was as the invaders were forced out that evidence emerged of a Nazi-style occupation. Thousands of villagers and townsfolk had been slaughtered before being bulldozed into mass graves. Many were tortured and beaten before they were killed. Kyiv did not fall, but in the months that followed, the capital, like other cities across the country, came under relentless attack from missiles and long-distance shelling that left whole neigbourhoods, including hospitals and public utilities, in ruins.
Two weeks after the conflict began, the UN reported that more than one million Ukrainian refugees, mostly women and children, had fled the fighting. NATO – revitalised, like Lazarus – swung into action, closing ranks, channeling weapons and ammunition, as well as vital military intelligence, to fend off the aggressor. When German Chancellor Olaf Scholz pulled the plug on Nordstream 2, the gas pipeline dreamt up by Putin and Angela Merkel, the Russian dictator responded by cutting off supplies to Europe, initiating an energy crisis and levels of inflation not experienced since the 1970s.
Far from the firing lines but with an equally grim message, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change announced that part of what was happening to weather patterns across the globe was “irreversible”. Should we have been alarmed? Probably. But at the COP 27 gathering in Egypt, held later in the year, the response could be summed up as, “Say all the right things, just don’t ask us to put our hands in our pockets”.
In April, as Russian armoured columns limped out of the area around Kyiv, the Russian cruiser Moskva – pride of the Black Sea fleet – was sunk, most likely by saboteurs, in what would prove an unbroken sequence of humiliations for Putin and his generals.
But not all the year’s big news came out of Ukraine. China’s besuited Emperor Xi Jinping surprised precisely no one when he increased Beijing’s threat level against Taiwan. He wants the breakaway island back and he wants it now. Fortunately for Taipei, though not for the 1.4 billion citizens of the People’s Republic, Xi and his cronies have so mishandled the Covid crisis that there are even those willing to speculate that a change of regime could yet be on the cards. It seems unlikely, but who knows? Might it be that both Xi and Putin, having failed in their sworn missions, could yet be overthrown, resetting the world for the second time since 1990?
Elsewhere, the one-time cricketer Imran Khan, a political chancer of the first order, was deposed as Pakistan’s prime minister and charged with corruption. Later in the year, he would be shot and wounded while on the comeback trail, a misfortune that paled into insignificance seen against a spectacular inundation that killed thousands, leaving millions homeless. Further east, Australia’s controversial right-wing premier Scott Morrison was defeated at the polls by Labour’s Anthony Albanese, of Italian extraction – the first Australian leader not to boast an Anglo-Saxon surname. And in Israel, the baleful figure of Benjamin Netanyahu resurfaced, forcing the country to contemplate that, short of Iran, it is all too often its own worst enemy.
For Europe – the EU, that is – 2022 was possibly the worst year in its history, marked by Covid, economic recession and institutional morbidity. An attempt was made to circle the wagons against Russia, but the effect was to highlight the fact that, sanctions aside, it was individual member states, rather than the Council of Ministers or the Commission, that were most effective. Of the 27, Poland and the Baltic states made most of the running. From a slow start, France picked up the pace as the year advanced. Germany, though, continued to hold back, while Italy remained self-absorbed. Hungary, under the swaggering Viktor Orban, was only the most obvious outlier, having decided apparently that Putin was more sinned against than sinning.
Economic recession is the EU’s latest default position, forcing ministers everywhere to cut back on everything beyond borrowing and rhetoric. At the same time, bubbling not far beneath the surface, the issue of climate change refuses to go away. Last summer in Europe and much of Asia was the hottest on record, with temperatures frequently registering 40 degrees celsius and more. Anyone who imagined that those warning about the impact of global warming were no more than the latest exponents of Project Fear have been proved wrong and need to wake up. The world may need oil and gas for the next 10 years, possibly the next 20, but if we haven’t arrived at a sustainable future by 2040, the planet that gives us life could be beyond saving.
Still, always look on the bright side, I like to say. Just as Brussels was positioning itself to act as the guiding light to which the EU could once more turn in confidence, a new scandal broke that brought cheer to its many critics, especially those in the UK who refuse to acknowledge that Brexit was not an unalloyed triumph. The European Parliament was revealed to be a house of cards, played by the Gulf state of Qatar as a means of building on the unexpected success of its weirdly located World Cup. Police raids on the homes and offices of MEPs revealed millions in cash said to have been given by Qatari agents bent on easy influence in the corridors of power.
Perish the thought!
Far (as he would assuredly assure us) from the taint of corruption, it was Boris Johnson as Margaret Thatcher to Joe Biden’s George H W Bush (“Don’t go wobbly on me, Joe”), who made all the right noises during the opening rounds of the Russian invasion. Bojo was a disaster as the UK’s prime minister, so much so that in September he was removed from office by his own MPs. But as Zelensky’s cheerleader in the West and sometime armourer, he performed a valuable role, shaming even the French into taking a tough line against Putin.
Looking back at the Johnson years, the mystery is not so much that his end was wreathed in ignominy as that it was ever supposed he might be up to the job. It is surely illustrative of his character that in the less than four months since he left office, he has devoted himself almost exclusively to making himself rich as a comedy turn at international gatherings of the rich and powerful. Partygate – the scandal of reckless behaviour that enveloped Downing Street in the midst of Lockdown – was the last straw, but the camel’s back, like the Boris-led economy, had been broken long before.
What followed was the insult to constitutional injury. After an absurdly protracted leadership election, restricted to the mostly retired and elderly membership of the Tory Party, Liz Truss was proclaimed the new UK prime minister. She lasted 49 days. Such was the extent of the black hole at the centre of her emergency budget, presented by an over-excited Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, that all life and hope was sucked out of the nation’s economy, leaving it lost in darkness. As the pound dropped like a stone and investors joined pundits in a chorus of mockery notable for its cruelty, Truss was expelled from Downing Street and her role handed on a plate to Rishi Sunak, one of Britain’s richest men and the first politician of Asian heritage to lead his country.
Sunak’s arrival in office was the prelude to a spate of public sector strikes the like of which has not been seen in Britain since the Winter of Discontent of 1979. The question is, can he turn the leaky ship around before it strikes the rocks or must Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, be regarded – as all the polls suggest – as prime-minister-in-waiting?
It was in September, in the midst of this ongoing pantomime, that the Queen died. Aged 96, she had finally had enough. Her hand as monarch had first been kissed by Churchill, born in 1879 when her great-great-grandmother Victoria wore the Crown. Liz Truss must have seemed like a child, and a very foolish child, by comparison.
The royal funeral was a triumph. No other country could have put on such a show. The world applauded and bowed its head, sensing perhaps that the spectacle, choreographed by a history nearing its end, will never be repeated. Charles III, aged 74 , now sits on the throne, earnest, intelligent and dutiful, but lacking the effortless mystique that so marked his mother. His heir, Prince William, and his wife, now Princess of Wales, may keep the show on the road for another generation after his father. They look as if they mean business. But if they do, it will be without the help of Harry and Megan, the absentee Duke and Duchess of Sussex, who, arguably, were put on Earth to demonstrate that space can be wasted.
On the far side of La Manche, with less and less up his sleeve, Emmanuel Macron was elected this year to a second term as President of France only to lose his majority in the National Assembly six weeks later so that he has been ducking and diving ever since. In Germany, Olaf Scholz, for long an understudy to Angela Merkel, was caught out by the invasion of Ukraine and the resulting energy crisis. Macron at least has five years of experience at the top to call on; Scholz always looks as if he missed the boat yet somehow ended up on the bridge, with his hand on the telegraph handle, not knowing whether to reverse course or order full-steam-ahead. Equally perplexed is the new Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, an anti-immigrant populist who came to power at the very moment when the fiscal skills of her predecessor, Mario Draghi, were most required. It is probably too early to write her off, but in the minds of the cognoscenti the necessary phrases are already forming.
Astonishing as it seems after the Trump years, it is to the United States that we can now look for at least a show of stability and good sense. Joe Biden, against all odds, has cooled the political temperature. The midterms were a triumph for the 80-year-old President. He lost the House by a handful of seats and held on to the senate with an increased majority. Both Democrats and Republicans continue to thrash around, the former obsessed with societal issues, the latter undecided on whether or not to go with crazy or to track back to sensible, middle-of-the-road conservativism. As things stand, Biden has accomplished his number one goal, by way of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, that over the next ten years should roll out an extraordinary $350 billion to “build back” America.
Biden is, however, an old man, increasingly prone to “senior moments,” and his party has to decide next year whether to go with him for a second term or, like Speaker Nancy Pelosi, aged 82, to hand over to a new generation. Republicans, for their part, must choose between Trump (76) or 44-year-old Florida governor Ron DeSantis, on the right of his party but deemed to be sane, as their candidate for 2024. Others, from the old-school centre, could emerge, but they would have to be quick on their feet and at the very least keep a MAGA hat in their pocket.
Whoever comes out on top, and however febrile the contest, the near certainty is that Russia and China, as well as the global economy, will end up at the top of both side’s priorities list. But not far down, as in Europe, illegal immigration and the future of social media will continue to dominate the headlines. The world’s disadvantaged, from Africa and central Asia, are on the move and no one in the West knows how to stop the exodus of millions – overwhelmingly young men – ready to risk death at sea or in the desert in pursuit of a better life. Rishi Sunak thinks he has the answer. He doesn’t. Nor does Joe Biden, and nor does Giorgia Meloni. The war in Ukraine will end. China may relent on its determination to seize Taiwan. Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg might team up with Elon Musk to build homes for the poor. But climate change and immigration are with us for the long haul. We need to get used to the idea.
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