It is now time to take stock, as we always do, of the year that is about to bid us farewell and disappear off into that void we call history. The passage of time is not something to be afraid of; yet we often fear it because it reminds us, as if we need reminding, that we ourselves are getting older.

Almost every year, it seems, something of significance occurs that we know will be of interest to historians of the future. But this year, 2022, has been a bumper year for historical events; so much so that, I feel sure, historians will mark it down as a Very Important Year in British, or U.K., history.

IN MEMORIAM: Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II (1926-2022); Dame Olivia Newton-John (1948-2022); Sidney Poitier (1927-2022); James Caan (1940-2022); Meat Loaf (1947-2022); Jerry Lee Lewis (1935-2022); William Hurt (1950-2022); Christine McVie (1943-2022); Shinzō Abe (1954-2022); Ivan Reitman (1946-2022); Dennis Waterman (1948-2022); Bernard Cribbins (1928-2022); Jean-Luc Godard (1930-2022); Irene Cara (1959-2022); Teresa Berganza (1933-2022); Maxi Jazz (1957-2022); Leslie Phillips (1924-2022) and Pelé (1940-2022).

These are some of the most significant, and, for me, important figures who popped off during the year in question. I met two of the above: Bernard Cribbins – I shall treasure an afternoon we spent with him before and after a one-man show he performed in Wimbledon when he was just 87 years old; and Olivia Newton-John, whom I have loved since I was eleven and my dear wife and I finally got to meet her after a show she did in an old church in London in early 2017. Also, I regret not going to see Jerry Lee Lewis perform at Wembley Arena in London when he was on tour with Chuck Berry and Little Richard sometime during the 1990s. Now, all three are dead.

In June, the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth celebrated the Queen‘s Platinum Jubilee, which translates as 70 years on the ‘throne.’ There were many celebrations across this land; however, the Queen herself was too ill to attend a number of events due to ‘mobility issues.’ Anyone with half a brain cell could work out that it was more serious than that, yet, when she did appear she seemed as bright and as radiant as ever. It’s amazing what make-up and a pair of gloves can do.

On 6 September, after Liz Truss had won an election to succeed Boris Johnson as Prime Minister, the new PM travelled to Balmoral in Scotland to meet the Queen so that the monarch could formally appoint her. Traditionally, this was done at Buckingham Palace in London, but once again the Queen was ‘too ill’ to travel. This time, when photos appeared of Ms Truss’ investiture, they were shocking. The Queen looked deathly ill, and the huge bruises on her hands were signs of ‘mottling,’ caused by the heart not being able to pump blood around the body. Why they did not put gloves on her, I do not know. By now, it was obvious; the Queen was dying.

Death formally visited the Queen just two days later, on 8 September, and this set in motion two weeks of ‘mourning,’ and the former Prince Charles became head of state, given the name King Charles III. Naturally the debate began again about the system of constitutional monarchy we have in the U.K., and traditionally, if you’re a monarch or a monarch-in-waiting, Charles is generally not a good name to have: the first King Charles became the only monarch in British history to have his head cut off by his subjects. The second King Charles, his son, became the only monarch in British history to be forced into exile for a decade before taking the ‘throne’ in what we Brits like to call the ‘Restoration.’ Our brand new monarch, Charles III, is not only the oldest heir to get the top job, but also the first Defender of the Faith (Church of England) to ascend while already divorced and remarried.

That first week of September marked the first occasion in British history that we gained a new monarch and a new prime minister within 48 hours of each other. 2022 could well be a memorable year for that alone.

Having alluded to it already with the death of Queen Elizabeth II, it’s worth mentioning that this year is also likely to be remembered as the Year of Three Prime Ministers. We started the year with Boris Johnson, but it turned out that he had been very bad during the Covid-19 pandemic; our legal system took it very seriously that he had not followed his own government’s rules about socialising during a pandemic. He ended up being the first serving prime minister to face admonishment by the police, not to mention getting a Fixed Penalty Notice and a fine. Once that happened, he had to go.

Then came Liz Truss who, we’ve already mentioned, met the Queen just two days before the monarch died. But the writing was on the wall for Ms Truss from the very start; it seems that the Parliamentary Conservative Party were not happy at her election. The Conservative members up and down the country had voted her in, defeating her opponent, one Rishi Sunak, another minister (I think he was Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time) who had received a Fixed Penalty Notice and a bollocking off the police.

Worse was to come when Ms Truss and her new Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, announced a ‘mini-budget’ that did nothing for those on low incomes and indeed planned to get rid of the 45% income tax rate, or at least raise the income threshold at which point it kicked in. See, I know all the political terms.

But, it seems Truss and Kwarteng didn’t. Their ‘budget’ sent those pesky markets into overdrive, the pound tanked, inflation went up, and share prices sank like the proverbial sack of shit. Eventually, and quite against usual Conservative policy, the pair had to admit that they didn’t know what they were doing. Kwarteng was the first to go, becoming the shortest-serving Chancellor in British history at 38 days; he was followed six days later by his former boss, Liz Truss, who managed to become the shortest-serving prime minister in British history at just under 45 days.

“Finally!” thought Mr Sunak as he relished the thought of taking the job he thought would never be his. He and his wife entered 10 Downing Street becoming the wealthiest couple in British history to occupy the prime ministerial gaff with a combined wealth of around £750 million. Indeed, it was noted that, when Mr Sunak went to meet his new Head of State, the aforementioned King Charles III, he and his wife were actually twice as wealthy as his monarch and his wife. 2022 became the Year of Three Prime Ministers, not the first in British history by any means, but the first for almost a century, and the first in the memory of almost everyone on the planet.

Football: This was the year of the World Cup which was not held in the close season summer months as it usually is, but in November/December time, meaning that almost every major top league in the world, including the British Premier League, had to come to a halt for six weeks in order for the best players to go for glory in Qatar. What? Yes, the World Cup was held in Qatar, a tiny nation tacked onto the side of Saudi Arabia, and a country which, yes, had they played the World Cup in June/July as normal, it would have been very hot indeed.

Some of those who weren’t asking questions about British or American politics, were asking how the blinking heck Qatar, a country with an appalling human rights record, got to host the World Cup in the first place. Not only that, but the logistical nightmare of wrecking every major league in the world to accommodate the championship must have kept many a well-paid executive up at night. From the media perspective, it seemed that protests were muted in Qatar itself, but many women’s groups and LGBTQ+ groups around the world called for a boycott of the tournament, which of course did not happen – there was too much money involved. Besides, many claimed that this year’s tournament was a fix, played to make sure Lionel Messi finally won his precious World Cup before he retires. Of course, it wasn’t. But there were some surprising results in the group games: Argentina, the eventual winners, lost their first match, as did Germany, who didn’t survive past the group stages. Spain put seven past Costa Rica, while England thrashed Iran 6-2. France, the other finalists, beat Australia 4-1 in their first match, however they lost their last group game against Tunisia. Spain and Portugal also lost their final group games. Amazingly, the only unbeaten sides in the Round of 16 were England, USA, Croatia, and the Netherlands. All bar USA made it to the next round.

It was at the Quarter-Final stage that things unravelled for England, at least. Up against France, the English had the misfortune of finding Kylian Mbappe on great form, putting two in the back of the net, against Harry Kane’s one. England were going home, they’re going home, English football’s going home…

Spare a thought for the Dutch squad; they went out at the Quarter-Final stage, having played five games and not lost any of them!

International News: On February 24, 2022, Vladimir Putin‘s Russian army launched what seemed to the international community a surprise attack on Ukraine, which lies on Russia’s southern border, close to the Black Sea. Of course, it wasn’t a surprise attack at all, but what was deemed as an escalation of a war that had been ongoing since 2014. Putin had set his sights on reclaiming Ukraine as a Soviet state, but Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his forces were having none of it. At the time of writing, almost a year after Putin invaded, Russia’s forces have barely made any headway into the country at all; Ukranian forces have held firm in every direction, and defended their country with great bravery and intelligence. Every day sees Putin more and more frustrated with the lack of progress and, frankly, motivation that his forces are giving him. Putin is in danger of losing this war, with the whole world watching and willing Ukraine to defeat the mighty Russian army.

Putin has spoken on Russian television many times, sending out warnings to the USA, the UK and other heads of state, telling them to back off or face nuclear annihilation. In other words, he is doing more fighting than his army, but it’s not getting him any closer to his aim. Britain and the US have been supplying weapons and other hardware to Kyiv without intervening directly. There’s nothing Putin can do about that, it seems, but there is a trade-off: he can block supplies of Ukrainian oil and gas to the rest of the world, sparking off energy crises in all parts of the so-called “West.” Lack of energy supply can have a knock-on effect in every part of human existence…Amazon deliver your Travis CD a day late? Sorry, mate, it’s the war in the Ukraine, we can’t get enough fuel to get out to you until next Wednesday, or possibly July.

More International News: Oh, dear God, former president Donald J. Trump announced his intention to run for the presidency of the United States at the next election in November 2024. That’s right, folks, we’ve just got over the midterms, in which Trump’s candidates were trounced, by the way, and he announces his intention to run for office again in two years’ time. This is a scary prospect on so many different levels. I promise I’ll try to keep it brief.

First of all, at the end of 2024, Trump will be facing the same problem Joe Biden faced in 2020: he will be 78 years old; too old, in my view, to run for the office which has the unofficial title of Leader of the Free World. Yes, so far Biden has survived it, he’s not dead, but a series of very public befuddlements and brainfarts in the middle of speeches have left observers scratching their heads and going, how did this man get into office? The Democratic party just don’t seem to be able to find a candidate that could do the job and do it well. After the whole Hillary Clinton fiasco, the Democrats then go and select someone who is old enough to be, er, well, old enough to be Hillary’s older brother. Worse still, Biden is threatening thinking of running again in 2024 against Trump, by which time Biden will be 82! That makes Ronald Reagan look like Greta Thunberg.

Dear Mr Biden & Mr Trump:

Please don’t run for the presidency in 2024. Please! If you want me to beg, I’ll beg. Let someone younger, more competent and less dangerous run the free world for us. Please!

Thank you so much,

Stephen Butler

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Ah well…another year comes quietly to its end, and we look forward to the next, in this case 2023. After all, not much has happened, has it…?

So much has in fact happened this year that it is difficult to know exactly where to begin. We continue to feel the rumblings of two major events to affect the United Kingdom: the global COVID-19 pandemic, which still seems very far from being declared “over,” and the 2016 “Brexit” referendum, in which the people of the UK voted by a massive majority of 1.8% to leave the European Union.

The Commonwealth, headed by the United Kingdom and including Canada, Australia and New Zealand and many others, suffered a seismic event when it lost its head of state, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II (1926-2022). She had, just three months earlier, celebrated her Platinum jubilee, her seventy years on the throne constituting an all-time record for a British monarch. Furthermore, just two days before her death, she had welcomed a new prime minister, Liz Truss, of whom more later.

But the death of the Queen on 8 September set in motion a sequence of events that, we are told, only one in four of us were old enough to remember previously, in 1952. In other words, three quarters of us here in the UK cannot remember anyone other than Queen Elizabeth II as our head of state. Indeed, when her husband, Prince Philip, died in April 2021 just two months before his 100th birthday, it seemed very unlikely that, after a loving marriage of 73 years, she would outlive him by very long, and so it proved.

When King Charles III ascended the throne, he almost immediately appeared on television to make his first address to the nation. In it, he said that he would continue his late mother’s role as head of the Church of England, while at the same time being a divorcee married to a divorcee, and a non-royal divorcee at that. The last time that happened, in 1936, King Edward VIII was forced to choose between his wife and his country (though Edward himself was not a divorcé. He chose his wife, and abdicated on December 11 that year. That was the year of the Three Kings, and it is ironic that King Charles should take on the monarchy in the Year of the Three Prime Ministers, of whom more later.

King Charles III is the first divorced British (or English) monarch since Henry VIII. Further irony for Charles is that Henry set up the Church of England, a protestant religion, in order for him to obtain that divorce, from Catherine of Aragon in 1533. Yet, as a rule, except in very special circumstances, the Church did not marry divorcées. That is, until 2002. Have a look at the form, which details the entire sorry rigmarole that you need to go through in order to remarry in church, here: https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2017-11/MarriageAFTERdivorceFORM.pdf

When Prince Charles, as he was then, married the former Camilla Parker-Bowles on 9 April 2005, it’s worth noting that his beloved grandmother, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, and who would likely have been opposed to such a marriage, had died in 2002, and also that his mother the Queen gave her permission for his marriage to the Privy Council. As Head of The C of E, she could (and should, in the eyes of some) have blocked the wedding, which would have made things very difficult constitutionally.

Further irony is heaped on the situation because Charles and Camilla elected not to be wed in church at all, but in a civil ceremony at the Civic Hall in Windsor. This meant that the groom’s parents, Queen Elizabeth II and her consort Prince Philip, did not attend their own son’s wedding (although they did attend the blessing service held later and the reception at Windsor Castle).

What’s all this for? Oh yes, to make the point that, despite our own (as a human race, that is) decision that our Royal Family are somehow born better than the rest of us, they are, to all intents and purposes, just like us. They get divorced just like us. They want to stop working and move to California just like us. They want to get involved with child sex traffickers just like us.

King Charles’ brother Andrew’s involvement and friendship with the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein is at the same time puzzling and dangerous. Also pretty stupid was his decision to try to justify this friendship in a car-crash television interview with Emily Maitlis in 2019. So stupid was this interview that it, and the circumstances around it, are being made into a movie! What??? No!!! I sit corrected – it’s being made into two movies!

Maitlis herself is producing a movie based on her interview with Andrew, as is her former boss at the BBC, Sam McAllister. Whether either of these two movies turns out to be any good remains to be seen, but it proves one thing: that Andrew’s decision to try and justify his friendship with Epstein in order to try and save himself was simply crazy; just plain stupid.

Many body language experts have ripped this interview apart and proved that Andrew was, for the most part, either lying or offering excuses (allegedly) for certain events and timelines that were utterly unbelievable (allegedly). He could not have had sex with Virginia Giuffre, then Virginia Roberts aged 17, on the night she claimed because he remembered he was at Pizza Express in Woking celebrating his daughter Beatrice’s birthday (allegedly).

After from a break of about a month or so during which Andrew, and his brother Charles, were allowed to grieve the death of their mother the Queen, the new King Charles has let his brother know in no uncertain terms that he doesn’t believe a word of it and he is going to have to face the music for what he has done (allegedly). This could mean that Andrew will be stripped of his royal titles, his royal privileges, and most importantly of all, his royal salary, paid for by the taxpayer, and the one he is reluctant to relinquish most of all. We have yet to see.

But King Charles does not only have to contend with that royal headache. His youngest son Harry’s marriage to an American actress, herself a divorcée, and subsequent withdrawal from royal duties has led to accusations of maltreatment of him and his wife by other members of the royal family, including and perhaps especially his father King Charles, and his brother, the new Prince of Wales and future monarch, Prince William. More dangerously than that, however, Harry’s marriage has also led to accusations of racism within the ranks of the Royal Family.

Though hitherto unnamed, a particular member of the Family expressed concern that Harry’s two children with the former Meghan Markle were black. Mrs Mountbatten-Windsor does not seem to have hit it off either with Harry’s family or the British public. Being a former actress, it was natural that she should base herself in or near the city of Los Angeles, the place where dreams are made. And Harry, desperate to prove to his brother that his marriage was as strong as William and Kate’s, has followed Markle wherever she goes. He has withdrawn from royal life so that he can make his own money by writing books and making documentaries in which he can sling muck at his family and royal colleagues. It has been suggested that Harry is jealous of William’s automatic future accession to the throne by the simple virtue of his being the older sibling, despite the fact that that has been the procedure in this and every other royal household since the beginning of recorded history. He, too, recorded a car-crash interview, this time with Oprah Winfrey, and with his wife alongside him, and they also made a six-hour documentary series for Netflix in which they promised to reveal everything (allegedly) and revealed nothing (allegedly).

In among all of this, the Queen decided that she had had enough and lost her battle with breathing on 8 September 2022. She had already become the first monarch in English (or British) history to reach her Platinum jubilee. That’s 70 years, folks, which makes it highly unlikely to be repeated within the next century at least! Nobody currently living on this Earth now is likely to experience another such jubilee. Unless something disastrous happens, of course.

Just 48 hours before she died, Queen Elizabeth, known affectionately among her subjects as Liz, welcomed another Liz – this time Liz Truss, newly-installed by Conservative Party members as their leader, and by default Prime Minister. Truss got the job because her predecessor, Boris Johnson, had been forced to resign after he and members of his party had broken laws that they themselves put in place to stop the spread of COVID-19 during the pandemic – which, as I mentioned earlier, is still ongoing at the time of writing. I mean, bloody hell. Johnson, and other ministers, received a Fixed Penalty Notice (basically, a fine and a telling-off) (allegedly), but that wasn’t enough. Johnson had to go.

The final two candidates were Liz Truss and former Chancellor Rishi Sunak. For some bizarre reason best known to themselves, party members chose Truss over Sunak, something that displeased Tory MPs greatly; they resolved to do something about it. Thankfully, at least from the Tory perspective, they didn’t have to do anything at all. Truss, and her new Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, did it for themselves.

Almost immediately upon taking office, Truss and Kwarteng decided to stamp their authority on proceedings by introducing what was referred to by the media as a “mini-budget.” Firstly, in order to generate a small amount of income, the basic rate of income tax was reduced from 20 to 19%. This extra money, however, and a lot more besides, was pissed away when Kwarteng decided to abolish the higher rate of income tax in England, then set at 45%. “Wow!” said the rich, “thank you very much!” “Uh-oh,” said Everybody Else, “you’re fired.”

The Stock Market reacted violently to this decision and began to fall sharply, as did the value of the pound, cheesing off the population of Great Britain and Northern Ireland something rotten. Members of Parliament, who would have benefitted from this tax cut, also reacted sharply and called for Truss and Kwarteng to reverse this policy, but the two leaders of the financial market stood their ground and refused to budge.

This was an ill-advised decision. To try and save her own skin, Truss sacked Kwarteng on 14 October, making him the shortest-serving Chancellor in history. Worse was to come. Truss’ reputation, never on solid ground in the first place, finally crumbled and she resigned on 20 October. This essentially paved the way for Rishi Sunak to take the job, albeit through another leadership election.

What’s surprising – nay, amazing – is that all of this took place without a General Election and a change of government, which Labour leader Sir Kier Starmer and his party were calling for, because they knew that they were so far ahead in the opinion polls that they would have trounced the Tories if such an election had taken place.

So, the Tories were third in the popular opinion polls, they (and we) have had three prime ministers in 2022. One journalist pointed out that it took twenty-eight years to get through three prime ministers after Margaret Thatcher’s first election win in 1979.

Royalty, politicians…they’re just like us, you know. Despite our voluntary decision to hold these people aloft and consider them from a higher plane than the rest of us, they’re just like us, except – purely through virtue of birth – they get to enjoy privileges that none of us will ever see. But, thanks to the media and its influence on popular opinion, they are also held accountable when they think they can get away with stuff that would finish our careers in the Real World. But now politicians, and even royalty, are staring down the barrel of the gun that popular opinion is directing right at them. Not that I approve of gun violence of any sort; and besides, the gun probably isn’t loaded anyway. The status quo has been maintained.

Happy Christmas. Let us hope that 2023 brings us some joy instead of the predicted turmoil of sickness, strikes, royal and political shenanigans, not to mention a deeper cost of living crisis of which there seems to be no end. Let us hope for a miracle and all of these causes for hopelessness will be turned around. x