2024 was a year of lies, anger, scandal, letdowns, war, tragedy… but also a little hope
THE defining image of 2024 was captured after Donald Trump escaped assassination by the few millimetres that changed history.
Photographer Evan Vucci took the picture of Trump — bloodied but unbowed, his fist raised in defiance — seconds after a failed attempt on his life at an open-air campaign rally in Pennsylvania.
In the background of that instantly iconic image, a Stars And Stripes fluttered against an impossibly blue sky and a Secret Service agent stared directly at the photographer from behind his dark glasses.
After surviving that, nothing would stop Trump’s triumphant march back to the White House.
Not the increasingly gaga Joe Biden, who at a Nato summit in July introduced Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky as “President Putin”.
Not cackling Democrat candidate Kamala Harris and her barmy army of celebrity backers. Not numerous legal cases brought against Trump in the American courts.
READ MORE FROM TONY PARSONS
Trump won the presidential election in November, and it was a profoundly uncomfort- able moment for the UK’s new Labour government, who had for years abused Trump on social media — and now discovered they had to do business with him.
“Congratulations to @realDonaldTrump,” grovelled Foreign Secretary David Lammy on X, formerly known as Twitter — the platform where Lammy once called Trump a “neo-Nazi sympathising sociopath”.
In the same month that Trump won and Labour genuflected, the Australian Parliament banned social media for the under-16s.
Watching Labour bigshots crawl to Trump on X suggested that social media should be banned for middle-aged Labour ministers, too.
Most read in The Sun
Democracy was the big global theme of 2024.
More people than at any time in human history — two billion — voted in elections. And in the majority of these — in the US, UK, South Africa, India, Japan — the party in power got a kicking.
Russia was the exception, where Vladimir Putin was re-elected in a sham election in March, one month after courageous opposition leader Alexei Navalny died in a prison camp above the Arctic Circle.
In the UK, the Tories were put out of their misery, after five prime ministers and 14 years of power.
LABOUR won a 174-seat majority that was called a loveless landslide because it was achieved on less than 34 per cent of the vote.
Before the year was out, an Ipsos poll judged Sir Keir Starmer the most unpopular PM in modern history.
After multiple attempts, Nigel Farage was finally an MP. His Reform UK had just five MPs but 4,117,610 votes — nearly 500,000 more than the Lib Dems, who had 72 MPs.
A self-styled “model” threw a milkshake in Farage’s face on the campaign trail but — like his friend Donald Trump — the momentum was with Nigel and his party.
Milkshakes would not stop him now.
During her 70-year reign, our late Queen Elizabeth had seemed quietly indestructible.
But in 2024 we learned that the Royal Family was as fragile as every other family, when the two most popular surviving members were diagnosed with cancer.
In January, King Charles III was receiving treatment for an enlarged prostate when cancer was discovered.
Kate and the King’s fights against cancer were inspirational
Tony Parsons
The type of cancer was undisclosed but we were informed it was not prostate. Charles began treatment in February.
Also at the start of the year, Catherine, Princess of Wales, had major abdominal surgery which led to the discovery of an undisclosed cancer.
In March, Kate revealed she was in the early stages of preventative chemotherapy. The slimmed-down monarchy never seemed so vulnerable.
By the end of 2024, Catherine had successfully completed treatment. The King’s treatment will continue into next year, with a Palace source saying it was “moving in a positive direction”.
After watching his wife and father fighting cancer at the same time, Prince William described 2024 as “brutal — the hardest year of my life”.
And yet Kate and the King’s fights against cancer were inspirational to the many of us who had experienced the disease striking our own families.
In May, Ipsos published a Royal Family approval rating — and only Prince Andrew rated lower than the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
The unpopular Sussexes largely kept a low profile.
They made faux-royal visits to Nigeria and Colombia and released their fourth project for Netflix — a series about Polo, greeted by global yawns.
But it was only at the end of this traumatic royal year that there was some scandal — Prince Andrew’s friendship with alleged Chinese spy Yang Tengbo came to light, a possible attempt by Beijing to infiltrate the guest list at Annabel’s nightclub.
AS ALWAYS, we found time to amuse ourselves with beer and skittles, sport and music.
With four divorces between them, Liam and Noel Gallagher announced they would be getting Oasis back together. Fourteen million people chased 1.4million concert tickets.
Taylor Swift became the biggest music star since Elvis — on the back of her Eras tour, the top earning concert series in history, netting $2BILLION.
English football remained the greatest show on Earth.
Manchester City won their fourth Premier League in a row — but by the end of 2024 Pep Guardiola’s title-winning machine looked as if it was finally out of warranty.
Strictly Come Dancing was won by comedian Chris McCausland, the show’s first blind contestant. Jake Paul and Mike Tyson performed a slow waltz on Netflix.
Oppenheimer cleaned up at the Oscars — but from Gladiator II to Kung Fu Panda 4, Inside Out II to Paddington In Peru, cinema was dominated by sequels that were not as good as the originals.
Gary Lineker announced he was stepping down from Match Of The Day. Alan Shearer had once inherited his England shirt from Gary but the presenter’s chair on MOTD proved much harder to land for an old, bald, white bloke.
Gareth Southgate called it quits as England manager after taking the team to a second successive Euros final defeat.
Southgate was easily the most successful England manager since Sir Alf Ramsey. He is tipped to be knighted at the end of the year, but has never got the love from this country that he truly deserves.
Man-mountain heavyweights
He was replaced by ex-Chelsea manager and committed Anglophile Thomas Tuchel. It is quite possible that when football finally does come home, it will be a German driving the team bus.
Football saw virtue-signalling rainbow armbands, and platitudes about inclusion and tolerance, abound.
But the capital of world sport was increasingly Riyadh in Saudi Arabia — not necessarily known for its obsession with LGBTQ+.
Man-mountain heavyweights Tyson Fury and Oleksandr Usyk settled their differences — and pocketed their multi-million pay packets — in Riyadh, not Wembley or Las Vegas. It was also announced that the football World Cup of 2034 will be in Saudi Arabia.
At the Commonwealth summit in Samoa in October, people who were never slaves demanded reparations for slavery worth billions of pounds from people who were never slave owners.
It was only the UK that was considered liable for the sins of slavery by Commonwealth heads of government.
NOT a word was spoken of the African nations that had traded slaves for centuries.
After three small children were stabbed to death at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport there was an explosion of riots from Plymouth to Sunderland.
Elon “Mystic” Musk predicted civil war in the UK.
But the riots were put down, and this remained the most tolerant country on Earth. Rishi Sunak, a Tory leader of East African Hindu parents, was replaced by Kemi Badenoch, a black woman born in Wimbledon but who grew up in Nigeria.
And like Sunak before her, nobody even thought Kemi’s race was a big deal. The UK is a multi-racial, multi- cultural country now. But immigration remains the hot-button topic.
THE Office for National Statistics estimated the UK’s net migration for the year ending June 2024 was 728,000.
That’s down from the previous year’s record high of 906,000, but still nearly the same population as Leeds.
Labour wants to build 1.5million new homes. But the Construction Industry Training Board forecast that it will need more than 250,000 additional skilled workers by 2028 and, if we do not train our own youngsters, these skills will need to be imported.
Labour scrapped the Tory plan to ship failed asylum seekers to Rwanda, and yet seemed clueless about how to bring down immigration to anything like manageable numbers.
Labour’s lightning-fast fall from grace obscured Starmer’s achievement.
After the chaos of Jeremy Corbyn, Sir Keir had brought about what many thought impossible — voters were no longer afraid of Labour.
On the campaign trail, he had looked as blandly reassuring as Tony Blair. But in power, he soon looked like someone who tried to get Red Jezza elected — twice.
Endlessly self-righteous in opposition, Labour had taken the moral high ground with those sleazy, lying Tories, forever clutching their free-trade pearls in horror.
In power, Labour looked infinitely less virtuous. They had made reassuring noises about not raising taxes on “working people”, but anyone expecting a pro-business, aspirational Labour Government like the last one was in for bitter disappointment.
Labour had lied. Here was socialism, red in tooth and claw — and green Kryptonite to economic growth.
While showering inflation-busting raises on their union pay- masters, Labour hiked employer National Insurance contributions, snatched the Winter Fuel Allowance from ten million pensioners, and kicked farmers in the bullocks with changes to inheritance tax laws.
Starmer gathered a government of all the mediocrities
Tony Parsons
Labour grand promises to Women Against State Pension Inequality (WASPI) turned out to be big fat fibs.
Starmer clearly has a hopeless addiction to free stuff.
His troughing included Arsenal seats, Taylor Swift tickets, clothes for his missus and fashionable specs for himself, plus the use of Labour donor Lord Alli’s £18million penthouse for his son’s school studies.
Starmer gathered a government of all the mediocrities. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband with his deluded, lemming-like rush to Net Zero.
David Lammy, as out of his depth as Foreign Secretary as he had been on Celebrity Mastermind (“Who succeeded Henry VIII?” “Er . . . Henry VII?”). Chancellor Rachel Reeves paralysing growth. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper trying to stop the small boats by looking very stern.
The Terminally Ill Adults (End Of Life) Bill meant that assisted dying came closer to becoming law.
But many wondered if our relationship with life, death and God should really be entrusted to a Government that already looks like it should be put out of its misery.
Yet 2024’s cruel truth is that if Badenoch’s Tories and Farage’s Reform do not form some kind of alliance, we could very easily have ten years of shagged-out socialism.
In Gaza, the fate of 96 hostages taken by Hamas terror squads on October 7, 2023, remained unknown.
By the end of 2024, 45,000 Palestinians had been killed, many of them women and children. Hamas was routed but Gaza was rubble.
And 3,000 members of Hamas’s ally Hezbollah were seriously injured when their pagers exploded.
AS Israel invaded Lebanon, one million civilians were displaced.
In Syria, the Assad family’s brutal 53-year reign suddenly ended when Bashar al-Assad fled to exile in Moscow.
Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, the leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham rebels — an offshoot of al-Qaeda — spoke of moderation, reconciliation and stability.
“The country will be rebuilt,” he says.
“Fears are unnecessary.”
It seemed too good to be true, for the world remembers the years of violence and chaos that followed Saddam Hussein being deposed in Iraq, and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya.
But a fragile faith remains that the planet will find some peace in 2025.
That Syria will not suffer as Iraq and Libya suffered.
That a ceasefire in Gaza will come and hold.
That the bloody war of attrition between Ukraine and Russia may be resolved by the new administration in Washington.
READ MORE SUN STORIES
You can feel it in the air of the dying year.
As 2024 ends, the most cautious of hope for our troubled planet begins to stir.