THE enduring image of 2021 was a 94-year-old woman sitting masked and heartbreakingly alone at the funeral of the husband she had been married to for the last 73 years.
The picture of the Queen rigorously following the Covid rules at Prince Philip’s funeral in April seared itself into the nation’s consciousness.
For in her solitude and sacrifice, you could sense the suffering of a country battered by a second year of coronavirus.
The year began with a lockdown and ends with another one waiting in the wings. But 2021 should have been full of optimism and hope.
At the start, the great vaccination rollout — that national triumph — was just a month old. By the end of the year, 130million jabs had been administered, including 30million boosters and a staggering one million jabs a day by December.
In January, UK-wide Covid deaths peaked at 1,800 a day. By December, deaths were down to below 100. Then why does 2021 feel like such a wretched year? Because vaccinations were the Normandy landings in the fight against coronavirus but they did not end the war.
Because 2021 made us all feel a bit like Michael Corleone in The Godfather — “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!”
Because — as the Delta variant declined and the Omicron variant ran riot — we seemed stuck in a Covid twilight zone, destined to forever bounce between brief moments of freedom followed by endless restrictions, rules and lockdowns.
On July 19, the country opened up as most legal restrictions on social contact were lifted. Days earlier, despite the hooligans at the final, and losing on penalties, England’s footballers at Euro 2020 unleashed something approaching national ecstasy.
Left to rot
But by the year’s end we are once more sliding towards lockdown: Football games cancelled, entire industries shutting up shop, orders for the Covid elite to work from home, rumours of schools not reopening in January.
And once again there is nobody to count the cost to education, to worry for the 5.9million on NHS waiting lists, to save the healthy businesses left to rot, to prevent domestic abuse flaring behind all those locked doors.
When coronavirus came roaring out of China at the start of last year, there was a feeling of national unity that was greater than anything the British people had known since the Second World War. But 2021 was the year when our national unity felt frayed, fractured and shattered.
By the end of 2021, all social cohesion had gone to be replaced by a kind of Covid apartheid.
There was a cruel gap between the lucky office workers who could ditch the daily commute and work from home in their jim-jams. Others — the lower-paid, the working class — were not so lucky. The supermarket workers, the binmen. The drivers of trains, buses, lorries and delivery vans. The plumbers, electricians, builders.
There was a great divide between the millions who queued to be vaccinated and the stubborn ten per cent of eligible adults — around 6.4 million — who refuse to be vaccinated, even when it is these selfish souls who are most likely to need an NHS bed. A national debate about the price the vaccinated majority must pay for the choices of the unjabbed thickos will explode in 2022.
But perhaps the greatest divide, and the death blow to our national unity, was between those who followed the rules and those who did not.
In February, Health Secretary Matt Hancock announced a strict law that would get you ten years in jail if you lied to avoid quarantine, the kind of sentence handed out for child grooming, possession of firearms and rape.
But just one month after the Queen sat alone in her black face mask at Prince Philip’s funeral, The Celeb Report — in an award-winning Scoop of the Year — revealed CCTV footage that captured Hancock squeezing the buttocks of his colleague Gina Coladangelo while collecting her saliva sample with his tongue. The hypocrisy was staggering. It was Hancock who had been the great fanatic of lockdown, it was Hancock who had wiped away a sentimental tear on Good Morning Britain when the first vaccines arrived, it was Hancock who warned us how important it was to follow the rules. But not for him.
“I wasn’t even allowed to kiss my dying father because of Hancock,” said one angry, disbelieving voice on social media. “I hate him,” said a bride who has seen her big day endlessly postponed.
What made the scandal infinitely worse was that Boris Johnson did not sack the hypocritical love machine immediately. “The Prime Minister has accepted the Health Secretary’s apology and considers the matter closed,” sniffed a Downing Street statement of jaw-dropping insensitivity.
Inevitably, Hancock eventually went but his exposed snogging launched the narrative that would come back to haunt Boris Johnson at the end of the year, when stories emerged of Downing Street shindigs playing fast and loose with rules this Government set for the rest for us. Some of this was deliberately overstated by the Boris-haters on the opposition benches and at the BBC.
Lasting harm
But it created a corrosive narrative that saw a 23,000 Tory majority overturned at the North Shropshire by-election last week, and may well topple this Prime Minister. One law for them. One law for us.
The Queen had a rotten year. She lost the partner who had been by her side, just one step behind, through her long, glorious reign.
The tawdry sex scandal around Prince Andrew’s friendship with billionaire paedophile Jeffrey Epstein dragged on. And as they began healing the world from their California mansion, Harry and Meghan sat down with Oprah Winfrey to launch an attack on the Royal Family that, with its accusations of racism, did more lasting harm to Buckingham Palace than the Luftwaffe managed. Yet the Queen rose above it all. One year from her Platinum Jubilee celebrating 70 years on the throne, she has never been more loved.
Boris Johnson also had a rotten year but he has never been less loved. For Boris, 2021 was when the honeymoon was over and divorce proceedings began.
He had single-handedly ended the political paralysis strangling this country. He annihilated Jeremy Corbyn’s extremist Labour Party and in May 2020, shortly after coronavirus nearly killed him, he told the venture capitalist Kate Bingham: “We need you to stop people from dying.” Boris instructed Bingham to develop a safe coronavirus vaccine at a time when gloomy scientists were predicting it could take “years” to develop a jab.
Months later she succeeded with the help of Dame Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green, key members of Oxford university’s scientific team, who created the world- changing vaccine.
But Boris’ flaws were painfully apparent in 2021. Laughably painted as a rabid right-wing nutjob by his enemies, the Tory grassroots saw exactly the opposite when they looked at Johnson’s Government.
Historically high taxes, an uncosted green agenda, a lack of sympathy for the business community that felt like open disrespect when he was babbling mindlessly about Peppa Pig to the CBI. Boris was — of course — a Prime Minister during a global health pandemic, chosen by destiny to steer us through our greatest peacetime crisis.
But the lack of anything resembling true Tory values was made worse by the acts of political self-harm, all the serial cock-ups, all the times he tried to keep his chums in the tuck shop — Hancock caught with his metaphorical trousers down, Owen Paterson caught with his fingers in the lobby till — when it was obvious to everyone but Boris that they had to go.
Sleaze seemed to fill the air around Boris Johnson like a cheap cologne. The greatest blow to his prestige was when Lord David Frost, the Brexit Minister, resigned more in sorrow than in anger. “You know my concerns about the current direction of travel,” Frost wrote in his resignation letter. “I hope we will move as fast as possible to where we need to get to — a lightly regulated, low-tax, entrepreneurial economy, at the cutting edge of modern science and economic change.”
If Frost — that brilliant, unapologetic patriot — was the brains behind our negotiations with the European Union, then his leaving gave Boris Johnson’s faltering regime a full-frontal lobotomy.
And ultimately Frost’s resignation will do more lasting harm to Boris than all the allegations of wine-and-cheese sleaze put together. “Brexit is now secure,” wrote Frost, “The challenge for the Government is now to deliver on the opportunities it gives us.”
But will they? This was the year it became apparent that Brexit could be blown. Boris is mocked for writing two pieces before the 2016 Referendum, one making the case for Leave, the other for Remain. But there were always pros and cons to both staying in the EU and getting out. In 2021, we saw only the downside of Brexit.
We saw British exporters suffocated by red tape as they tried to move their goods into the EU, a situation about to become far worse when full border controls begin on New Year’s Day. We saw this “take-back-control” Government totally unable to stop the flow of illegal migrants crossing the English Channel. And we witnessed the fragile peace of Northern Ireland — and the future of the UK itself — threatened by the EU border that now exists between Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
In 2021 it became brutally clear that the European elite will stop at nothing to see Brexit fail.
Leavers always believed the EU would want to do mutually beneficial business with the UK. But seeing Brexit fail turns out to be far more important.
President Emmanuel Macron slandered our Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine as “ineffective” in the over-65s. A blatant Brit-bashing lie.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen briefly imposed a hard border in Ireland in a spiteful attempt to restrict the flow of vaccines into Britain, an insanely reckless act she “deeply regrets”. And French Prime Minister Jean Castex summed up the EU’s policy of spite nicely when he wrote that the UK must be shown that Brexit is “damaging”.
The EU can’t afford Brexit to succeed. Their entire rotten edifice comes crashing down if it succeeds. And the question in 2021 was: Does our cock-up-prone PM really have it in him to make Brexit work?
Cling on
Boris Johnson does not look like a Prime Minister who is settling in for a ten-year reign like Thatcher or Blair. He looks exhausted, spent, as though he wishes it were all over and he could end his reported post-divorce money worries by writing his memoirs and delivering lucrative lectures across the globe.
An unfit 57, with a young wife and two children under the age of two, you can’t help feeling he would be much happier if high office were behind him. But Boris will cling on for as long as possible because he wants to be Winston Churchill, not Theresa May.
It was a rotten year for the western world. Almost exactly 20 years after 9/11, America bailed out of Afghanistan, gift-wrapping it for the women-hating fanatics of the Taliban.
President Joe Biden’s chaotic, shameful retreat threw away a hard-won, if imperfect, peace and insulted the sacrifice of all the servicemen and women who fought and died there, not least Biden’s forgotten British allies.
“Was it worth it?” wondered British veteran Jack Cummings, a bomb disposal expert who lost his legs in Afghanistan. “Probably not. Did my mates die in vain? Yep.”
Terrorists everywhere will have been emboldened by senile Joe’s craven capitulation.
Our enemies were suddenly bolder in 2021. Russia has massed more than 100,000 troops on the border of Ukraine. China, its economy bouncing back as it cheerfully burns 50 per cent of the world’s coal, flies its planes at will into Taiwan airspace. Next year seems unlikely to give peace a chance.
The cultural event of 2021 was 50-year-old footage of four Scousers in their twenties making beautiful music together. Peter Jackson’s documentary on The Beatles was a postcard from a lost world.
And, young and old, in 2021 we remembered all our long-lost freedoms, and we wondered if they will ever come again.
