TONY PARSONS
From Donald Trump to Oasis, 2025 will be the year of the comeback – plus my predictions for the year ahead
Oasis 2025 will be rock’s greatest reunion since Led Zeppelin reformed — for one night only — in 2007
IN 2025, it will be the year of the comeback. At high noon local time on Monday, January 20, Donald Trump – who was once the 45th President of the United States – will be sworn in as the 47th POTUS.
And Trump: The Sequel will impact billions of lives around the world.
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From the defence of Europe to wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, from the way nations trade with each other to the planet’s fragile peace, the world in 2025 will largely be shaped by this most emotionally volatile — yet pragmatically transactional — of Presidents.
And there are other notable comebacks in 2025.
Some 16 years after Oasis broke up in Paris after a backstage bust-up between Noel and Liam, the battling brothers of Britpop will get the band back together.
Noel will be 58 and Liam 52 when the tour kicks off at the Principality Stadium in Cardiff on July 4.
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Oasis 2025 will be rock’s greatest reunion since Led Zeppelin reformed — for one night only — in 2007.
One of the talking points of the year will be if those irascible old rockers the Gallagher brothers can stand to be in each other’s company for an entire world tour.
And a New Labour blast from the past is back in the political front line — slinky old Peter Mandelson, New Labour’s Prince of Darkness, is resurrected as the UK’s unlikely Ambassador to Washington.
Only one British politician has anything like a close relationship with the new American president — the great disruptor himself, Nigel Farage, grinning supremo of Reform UK.
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As Mandy once called Trump “a danger to the world . . . little short of a white nationalist and racist” — and Trump adviser Chris LaCivita recently called Lord Mandelson “an absolute moron” — it is surely in our national interest if Peter Mandelson has Nigel Farage on speed dial.
Because it sounds like His Lordship is going to need all the help in Washington he can get.
After 14 years of Tory rule and six months of Labour, the political momentum is with Reform — who enter 2025 claiming more paid-up members than the Tories.
Oasis’ Noel and Liam Gallagher won’t get paid for tour until they perform over fears they’ll fall out and cancel concerts
Tech billionaire (and Trump ally) Elon Musk is reported to be contemplating donating $100million (£78million) to Farage’s party.
It remains to be seen if Musk coughs up.
Does the titan of Tesla realise that Reform don’t dig green crap like electric cars?
BUT even if Elon’s fat cheque gets lost in the post, the future will be shaped in the shadow of Farage.
Not because of his paltry five MPs but because of the stonking four million votes Reform got at the General Election.
Can new Tory leader Kemi Badenoch tempt them to come home to the Conservatives?
Can the Tories and Reform overcome their mutual loathing to defeat the shagged-out socialists?
Are Reform UK the representatives of the patriotic, aspirational working class now?
Nothing is certain, and everything is to play for.
The Royal Family had a traumatic 2024, with a cancer diagnosis for both King Charles III and Catherine, Princess of Wales.
The King’s treatment continues into 2025 while Kate has now completed her course of preventative chemotherapy and is focused on staying cancer-free.
But even when the King was fighting cancer, Charles remained the second-hardest-working royal — only Princess Anne performed more public duties — even taking a break from his treatment to tour Australia and Samoa.
And during her hardest of years, Kate appeared at events close to her heart — in the Royal Box at Wimbledon, at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday, and at her now traditional Christmas carol service.
The country will hope and pray that these two most beloved royals continue their journey to full recovery — and that we see even more of them in 2025.
It will be a huge year for women’s sport — the 2025 Women’s Rugby World Cup in England, the 2025 Women’s Cricket World Cup in India and probably at least one regular female presenter on the post-Gary Lineker Match Of The Day.
Great national sporting obsession
But our great national sporting obsession will remain the failure of the England men’s football team to win a trophy since 1966.
In 2025, the dream begins all over again under the Three Lions’ new German manager, Thomas Tuchel.
Between March and November England play their qualifying games for World Cup 2026, which will be co-hosted by Canada, Mexico and the United States.
England expects that every nation in our qualifying group — Serbia, Albania, Latvia and Andorra — will all be extravagantly hammered, home and away, no excuses.
Anything less will be treated as a national crisis of Suez-like proportions.
Blessed by the greatest generation of young English footballers in history, Herr Tuchel is likely to have his reputation enhanced and should end 2025 with this success-starved country singing his praises.
Es kommt nach hause, es kommt nach hause — der fussball kommt nach hause!
I would also bet my last euro that British heavyweight boxing is coming home in 2025.
SAUDI Arabia can look forward to hosting the 2034 World Cup and probably the Olympics not long after that.
But I strongly suspect that the heyday of British heavyweight boxers scrapping in Saudi for massive paydays has peaked after Tyson Fury lost for a second time to Ukraine’s unbeaten Oleksandr Usyk in their rematch in Riyadh.
“I was robbed there, f*** them,” raged Fury to his former trainer Ben Davison.
“You’re not getting nothing in these countries.”
These countries?
Fury always spoke so warmly about Saudi when he was winning.
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Tyson’s disappointment will lead inevitably to a domestic dust-up with Anthony Joshua — also beaten twice by the gracious, softly spoken Ukrainian — some time in 2025 at a Wembley Stadium awash with lager and 90,000 voices bellowing “Sweet Caroline”.
There are worse ways to spend a Saturday night.
Law and order — or lawlessness and disorder — will be a big part of our national debate in 2025.
The British High Street will feel the full force of the virtual decriminalising of shoplifting in the coming year.
In the year to March 2024, 245,000 shoplifting criminal cases were closed without a suspect being identified — let alone punished.
Shoplifting is an industry now, with 670 offences going unsolved every day.
In 2025, High Street daylight robbery will reach unprecedented proportions.
Increasingly, shoplifting will not mean a yob nicking a Mars bar — we will see highly organised criminal gangs, primed to use violence and smug in the knowledge they are going to get away with it.
And in 2025 we will increasingly ask: what exactly do the police do all day?
An asteroid will hurtle towards Earth, but we will see it coming.
The BX1 asteroid is expected to pass within 2.5million miles of us in March — close enough for scientists to study its composition but not close enough to destroy all forms of life on our planet.
But it is likely there WILL be a Black Swan event, that is quite literally unimaginable right now, just as there was in 2001 (9/11), 2008 (the financial crash), 2020 (the Covid-19 pandemic), 2022 (Russia’s invasion of Ukraine), and 2023 (the Hamas attack on Israel).
The world in 2025 will be shaped by one event that nobody sees coming.
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Hopes are high that having President Trump in the White House increases the chance of peace breaking out between Ukraine and Russia, Israel and the Palestinians, and in the wider Middle East.
It is possible to imagine an end to the slaughter.
What is much more difficult to imagine — on all sides — is an end to the hatred.
Will the UK enter recession in 2025? It seems increasingly likely.
As the old year ends, the economic storm clouds are gathering.
Firms are cutting back on production and hiring fewer staff.
This is a direct consequence of Rachel Reeves, Chancellor of the Exchequer, hiking employers’ National Insurance Contributions in her ham-fisted Budget.
Rachel from accounts has made it vastly more expensive to employ someone.
Next year the popularity of this flailing Labour Government will plumb new depths.
Labour promised not to raise taxes on “working people.”
But their growth-shredding strategy already means fewer jobs for working people.
THE phrase “hiring recession” will enter the English language in 2025 as it becomes horribly obvious that not one soul in Keir Starmer’s Cabinet has ever run a business.
And in 2025 we will pay the price for electing a government of business illiterates.
On multiple fronts, this unloved Labour lot is caught between a rock and a hard place.
Labour desperately need to ingratiate themselves with a Republican President — yet all their instincts are too cosy up to the stagnating EU.
Stagnating EU
Labour want business to invest in Britain — yet they can never resist talking the country down.
Energy Secretary Ed Miliband’s suicidal dash to Net Zero is the virtuously green thing to do — but it will increase our energy bills, turn the lights off and do bugger all to help a planet where the UK contributes just a paltry one per cent of global emissions.
In opposition, Labour made grand promises to everyone.
From the Commonwealth nations demanding billions from the UK in reparations for slavery, to the Women Against State Pensions Inequality (WASPI), to those who worry about net immigration figures that year after year are the size of a British city.
Finally in power, all of Labour’s big campaign promises look laughable.
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But perhaps the greatest bind that Sir Keir and Co find themselves in is that they crave economic growth when they are making it increasingly hard for the wealth creators to hire anyone.
So expect an old Tory slogan from 1978 to make its comeback in 2025: Labour isn’t working.
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