From England winning the Euros to the emergence of Kate as a full-blown national treasure, my predictions for 2024

AS THE old year ebbs away, here are my possibilities, probabilities and bet-your-shirt certainties for the ­coming 12 months.

THIS FEELS SURE IN 2024

AFTER the coming year’s great political event, the US presidential election, the free world will be led by an ancient, mush-brained mediocrity who should not be in charge of a hot dog stand.

Who is the worst option to be freedom’s great guardian — Joe Biden or Donald Trump?

Who chills the blood more — tired and confused Joe, that implacable Brit-hating old fart who always seems to go out of his way to defecate on the “special relationship”?

Or that Tango-tanned narcissistic Donald Trump, cheerleader for the baying mob; that immigrant-hating, woman-hating bigot; that draft-dodging jingoist; that rabble-rousing denier of democracy?

Personally I always find it such a hard call.

Biden and Trump are both so awful, both so spectacularly destructive for the free world, both such self-serving old gits.

But whatever old git the Yanks choose as their next leader at the 2024 election — and right now, in-credibly, it does look like it will be a straight choice between Biden and Trump — this second-term, second- rate POTUS will be an enormous comfort to authoritarian dictators across the world.

2024 is a year of elections — in the US, Russia, Taiwan, India, Mexico, Pakistan, South Africa, the European Parliament, and here in the UK.

Unusually, our General Election is almost certain to fall in the same year as the US Presidential election.

Legally, Rishi Sunak’s government must go to the polls by January 28, 2025.

Realistically, the election will be in spring or autumn of 2024.

Just over a year from now, Keir Starmer could be chuckling on the White House lawn with his new bestie President Trump — which will certainly be a sight Labour’s lunatic Left never saw coming.

After 13 years of Tory rule — and five Tory Prime Ministers, some of them even elected — will it be all change in the UK in 2024?

With the economy on the up and still no sign of Keir-mania on the horizon, the result will be closer than the polls suggest.

The great determining factor in the 2024 General Election will be this — voters are no longer afraid of the Labour Party.

At the start of 2024 we have a PM who is much younger and smarter than the incompetent oddballs who preceded him.

Yet there is a strange disconnect about Rishi Sunak, who seems to struggle to understand the everyday concerns of working people.

Sunak still has time to turn the polls around if he can understand — truly understand — how so many of our people are struggling just to survive.

But will he?

THE WORLD WE KNEW WILL CONTINUE TO DISAPPEAR

THE great British High Street was decimated by the double whammy of online shopping and the pandemic.

The shoplifting epidemic — huge business now, with £1billion of goods a year nicked from stores, and 200,000 shoplifting cases unpunished — feels certain to be the death blow to our High Street.

Despite Labour bleating about how the desperate poor are being forced to steal by the wicked Tories, the cost-of-living crisis does not explain the vogue for shoplifting.

One organised shoplifting gang, who were jailed last month, had stolen £34,000 of beer, wine and spirits from across eastern England.

If Labour do get in, then their the-evil-Tories-are-to-blame excuse for criminality is likely to be the first illusion to melt.

Less than four per cent — FOUR PER CENT! — of burglaries currently result in a conviction.

This is becoming a country fit for professional criminals.

Respect for the police is currently at an all-time low.

That will be near the top of our new Government’s in-tray in 2024.

And our new Prime Minister will be confronted by the great conundrum of all Western nations — immigration.

He will discover that it is dead easy to spout meaningless cliches about getting tough on immigration — take back control! — and so much harder to confront the reality.

The figures for legal immigration are staggering, and they will surely rise in 2024.

The latest net migration statistic is 745,000, which is the population of a city the size of Birmingham arriving every two years.

But we need these workers because we currently have 949,000 job vacancies and 5.2million Brits who are currently on Jobseeker’s Allowance, incapacity benefits or workless Universal Credit.

There will be much angry chatter about the small boats in 2024 — the British hate queue-jumpers — but the real issue facing Prime Minister Starmer or the PM Sunak is that immigrants are largely coming here to do the jobs that the locals don’t want to do.

But we will remain the most tolerant nation in the world while many nations in the European Union will continue to lurch to the extreme right in 2024.

In France, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Sweden and Hungary, eye-swivelling, anti-immi-grant parties that would seem repulsive in the tolerant UK are in the ascendancy.

Their power base will massively increase after the European Parlia-mentary elections in June.

In 2024, Brits will increasingly be entitled to ask our goose-stepping continental cousins: who are the xenophobic bigots now?

THE WORLD WILL GROW SICK AND WEARY OF WAR IN 2024

THERE will be no glorious military victories in the conflicts between Ukraine and Russia, Israel and Palestine.

And in 2024 the belief that there is one side that deserves our unconditional and unending support (and unlimited money) — will quietly expire.

There is already waning support for Ukraine in the US, where many Republicans believe the billions being sent there would be better spent shoring up America’s porous southern border.

Support for Israel is fading away in Europe because more than 20,000 Palestinians have died in Gaza and there is now the real prospect of famine.

In 2024 the innocent will die while the elite thrive.

Gaza has been reduced to rubble while the leaders of Hamas lounge by the pool in Qatar.

And as IDF reservists are killed and maimed, Benjamin Netanyahu’s 32-year-old son Yair lounges by a pool in Miami, Florida.

Seventy thousand Russian troops have died in their futile war, while Putin’s cronies party in Moscow.

The greatest land conflict in Europe since 1945 will not even be the lead item on the news in 2024.

The world’s best hope is that there will not be an escalation, with Israel opening up a second front against Hezbollah in Lebanon (a majority of Israelis currently favour a pre-emptive strike), or Russia’s aggression spilling over into the nations of Nato — or China finally invading Taiwan if Xi Jinping fails to see that wars are easier to start than finish.

Putin will be triumphant in the Russian election — where his opp-onents tend to be dreadfully unlucky with great heights — and if not victorious in Ukraine, then certainly not defeated.

For like Stalin in what Russians call the Great Patriotic War, Mad Vlad will happily feed an entire generation of his young countrymen into his voracious meat grinder.

We grew up on tales of the great dictators who were crushed. In 2024, Putin’s survival means we will be confronted by a horrible new reality.

The mad dictator who lived.

WE’LL FIND TIME FOR CULTURE AND PLEASURE

WE will not be immune from the wars of the world and their echoes will be felt on our shores, but we will find time for our beloved bread and circuses — for sport and dance and music.

The Premier League will remain the greatest show on earth — a never-ending story that always has a twist in the tail.

The big news in the Royal Family will be the unexpectedly impressive job that Charles is doing as King and the emergence of Catherine, Princess of Wales, as a full-blown national treasure, glamorous and loved.

The embarrassing royal relations — Harry and Meghan, Uncle Randy Andy — will become footnotes in 2024.

They have shot their bolt.

Mr and Mrs Markle have done their worst to hurt the Royal Family over recent years.

In 2024, they will have their waning popularity in the US to occupy their time.

We will have a good moan in 2024.

We will complain that we have never heard of any of the candidates on Strictly and then ten million of us will watch the final, brushing away a tear as our new favourites reach the climax of their “journey”.

British soft power will reach its high point as the Rolling Stones rock on as eightysomethings.

We will have our hearts broken at Wimbledon as some plucky young Brit falls just short of glory.

The country will fall in love with Taylor Swift when she plays eight sell-out shows at Wembley Stadium this summer.

EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED  . . . AS USUAL

AND the great event of 2024 will be . . . some unexpected black swan event that nobody sees coming.

Because we never do.

There was Covid-19 in 2020, the Taliban strolling back to power in Afghanistan in 2021, Russia invading Ukraine in 2022, and Hamas dest-roying any prospect of peace in the Middle East for a generation with the atrocities of October 7.

At the end of 2024, you can be certain that our world will have been shaken rigid by some event we never even imagined.

WE’LL BE HAPPY AND PROUD TO BE BRITISH

IF and when there is a change of government in 2024, it will be done with grace and dignity and a respect for democracy.

The defeated candidate will not call for his supporters to storm Parliament.

Nobody will fall out of a high window.

We are not Russia.

We are not America.

Thank God.

There is a theory that in 2024, the world will stop looking up to America.

The process has already begun.

When the US abandoned Afghanistan in such a cowardly and chaotic fashion after all those years and all that blood — much of it British — the craven abandonment encouraged Putin to invade Ukraine.

If — when — the West is further depleted by the election of Trump or Biden, will it embolden China in its own aggression as it seeks to distract its people from its tanking economy?

The best news of the coming year is that Germany will host Euro 2024 from June 14 to July 14.

And personally, I would bet my last euro that the most lavishly talented England team of my lifetime, led by captain Harry Kane, will win their first trophy since 1966.

We may look back on 2024 and decide it was a very good year.

Because football finally came home.