As is traditional I’m using my first column of the New Year to look back at some of the issues I covered last year.
2022 was a truly historic year.
It saw the death of Britain’s longest reigning monarch Queen Elizabeth II after a lifetime of dedication and service to our country. Most people alive today had no memory of living under any other monarch. She was a rare symbol of continuity in an ever-changing world.
As if to emphasise this, the Government descended into totally unprecedented chaos
One example of the longevity of the Queen was that there were fifteen prime ministers during her 70-year reign. If every year was like 2022, King Charles would beat his mother’s record in just five years.
The year started with Boris Johnson as prime minister – how long ago that now seems! – but he was already in serious trouble with revelation after revelation about the parties that took place in Downing Street during lockdown.
He became the only prime minister in history to have been found guilty of breaking the law but what finished him was the lies he told.
In the end, even the Conservative MPs who had loyally supported him finally had enough. He still tried to cling on though, as minister after minister resigned and for the first time ever there was a period of at least 24 hours when Britain didn’t have a functioning government.
As we breathed a sigh of relief at the end of what we thought was the most incompetent and sleazy government Britain would ever see, the Conservative Party had another trick up its sleave and imposed Liz Truss on the country.
In just one day, she and Kwarzi Kwarteng managed to crash the economy with their disastrous “mini-Budget”.
In my column immediately after, I predicted that it would cause mortgage rates and inflation to soar and lead to cuts in public services – all of which have come to pass. To be fair, it didn’t take a genius to foresee this, but Liz Truss was no genius. Her place in history is assured though as Britain’s shortest serving and most incompetent prime minister.
And so, we end the year with our third prime minister.
Rishi Sunak is the man who wasted billions loaning money to criminals and buying useless PPE from Conservative Party donors. The cabinet minister who received a lockdown fine. The Chancellor of the Exchequer who raised our taxes while his family dodged them.
The politician who kept a US Green Card just in case things didn’t work out in Britain. The man who stabbed Boris Johnson in the back to get his job. The candidate who wasn’t good enough to beat Liz Truss in the Conservative leadership election.
In yet another first he’s the richest man to ever be prime minister. Just the person to be in charge when the country is suffering from a Cost-of-Living Crisis.
The struggle for ordinary people just to get by due to rising costs and falling real wages was a constant theme throughout the year. I described it as “the next big crisis to hit the country” in my very first column of 2022.
Note that this was before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February which the Government now likes to blame for all our problems. In reality, Ukraine just made worse a problem that already existed.
And the Cost-of-Living Crisis is just one of the many issues that got worse over the last year while the Conservatives took their eye off the ball, fixated as they were with stabbing each other in the back.
We got a very vivid example of that here in Ipswich with the announcement that the Government were taking over the Novotel to house asylum seekers while their cases are being heard. This is a direct result of the Conservatives failing to tackle the criminal people-smuggling gangs and allowing the processing of asylum claims to fall off a cliff.
Let’s hope 2023 is a less exciting year with fewer historic firsts and more knuckling down by the Government to fix the problems it has caused.