It was the year an ITV drama highlighted the Post Office scandal and Labour returned to government, when Oasis reunited and Donald Trump regained the American presidency. Here we take a look at some of the people in the news in 2024.
January
The World Darts Championship at Alexandra Palace is dominated by the improbable emergence of a 16-year-old phenomenon, Luke Littler, who cruises through the draw before losing to the world No. 1, Luke Humphries, in the final. Hamas’s deputy political leader, Saleh al-Arouri, is killed in an apparent Israeli drone strike in Lebanon. A new ITV drama, “Mr Bates vs The Post Office”, highlights the scandalous mistreatment of thousands of operators of sub-Post Offices, who were accused of theft and false accounting on the basis of faulty software. Junior doctors in England stage a six-day walkout, the longest in NHS history. It’s the first of a series of walkouts that continue until the autumn, when they secure a pay deal. Dr Claudine Gay, the first black president of Harvard University, resigns in the wake of her ill-fated appearance before a congressional hearing. Asked whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” was a violation of Harvard’s harassment policies, she had replied, “It can be, depending on the context.” America and the UK launch a barrage of air strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen in retaliation for weeks of attacks on shipping in the Red Sea. The biggest election year in history, during which more than half the world’s population goes to the polls, kicks off in Taiwan, where Lai Ching-te wins the presidency.
February
King Charles steps back from public-facing duties after revealing that he is to start receiving outpatient treatment for cancer. Northern Ireland acquires its first Irish nationalist First Minister, in Sinn Féin’s Michelle O’Neill, when power-sharing returns to the region for the first time since 2022. President Zelenskyy removes the head of Ukraine’s armed forces, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi – a popular figure with whom he had been at loggerheads – saying, “A reset, a new beginning is necessary.” Keir Starmer attracts scathing criticism when he ditches Labour’s flagship green investment plan. The £28-billion-a-year pledge, unveiled at the party’s 2021 conference, had been Labour’s most expensive policy by far. Tucker Carlson, the Trump acolyte and former Fox News presenter, visits Moscow, where he is granted a two-hour interview with Vladimir Putin, most of which consists of Carlson being lectured on Russian history. He is accused of being a “useful idiot”; he insists that he was doing a public service. Vigils are subsequently held in cities across the world for Alexei Navalny, Putin’s most prominent critic, following reports of his death in a Russian jail. According to prison officials, the 47-year-old succumbed to “sudden death syndrome” after going for a walk at the isolated penal colony in Siberia known as Polar Wolf, where he was serving a lengthy jail term on trumped- up charges. Lee Anderson is suspended from the Tory Party after refusing to apologise for claiming that “Islamists” had “got control” of London’s Mayor, Sadiq Khan. Anderson later defects to Reform UK. Chaos erupts in the House of Commons after the Speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, is accused of defying long-established parliamentary procedure to spare Labour’s blushes over a vote on Gaza. Google’s AI chatbot Gemini is ridiculed for generating “woke” images of Native American “Vikings”, black Founding Fathers, and black and Asian Nazis.
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March
The veteran left-wing agitator George Galloway returns to Westminster for a three-month stint after winning a decisive victory in the Rochdale by-election. “So miracles happen,” declares Raye, the 26-year-old singer- songwriter from south London, after bagging a record six Brit awards – including Song of the Year for a track that her former label had refused even to release. Nikki Haley withdraws from the Republican nomination race after Donald Trump racks up primary victories on Super Tuesday. At the Oscars, Cillian Murphy becomes the first Irish-born winner of the best actor award for his role as J. Robert Oppenheimer. Kensington Palace releases a cheerful Mother’s Day picture of the Princess of Wales and her children, hoping it will end weeks of speculation about her health following abdominal surgery. It has the opposite effect, though, when photo agencies pull the picture from circulation, stating that it has been digitally edited. The Princess quells the conspiracy theories by revealing that she is receiving preventive chemotherapy, and requesting privacy after “an incredibly tough couple of months” for her family. The journalist Amelia Gentleman outs prominent members of the male-only Garrick Club, including Civil Service boss Simon Case. He tries to tough it out, claiming – to widespread ridicule – that he had joined the club in order to reform it from within, but later resigns his membership. He is readmitted later in the year, however, after the club votes to allow women to join. Anger about England’s polluted rivers grows when rowers in the Oxford vs. Cambridge Boat Race are warned not to enter the Thames owing to high levels of E. coli; several rowers claim to have fallen ill. A judge sentences “crypto king” Sam Bankman-Fried to 25 years in jail for one of the biggest financial frauds in US history. Jeffrey Donaldson resigns as leader of the Democratic Unionist Party following the shock news that he has been charged with non-recent sexual offences. He contests the charges; a trial date has been fixed for March 2025.
April
William Wragg resigns the Tory whip after falling victim to a “honeytrap” sexting scandal. Wragg had earlier admitted to passing colleagues’ phone numbers to a man he met on Grindr, a gay dating app. He said he was scared the man had “compromising things on me”, having earlier sent intimate pictures of himself. Iran launches its first-ever direct strike on Israel, firing more than 300 drones and missiles at it in retaliation for a strike on its consulate in Damascus that killed two leading Iranian generals and five other soldiers. President Biden urges the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, not to escalate hostilities in response to the successfully neutralised attack, telling him: “You got a win. Take the win.” Israel responds with a limited strike targeting an air base near the central Iranian city of Isfahan. The independent review of gender identity services for children and young people chaired by leading paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass issues its final report. It concludes that the guidelines surrounding the use of treatments such as puberty blockers rest on “shaky foundations”. Liz Truss releases a book, “Ten Years to Save the West”, in which she lifts the lid on her 49 days in No. 10 and her persecution at the hands of the “deep state”. The Tories are hit by yet another scandal, this time involving the MP Mark Menzies, who is reported to have rung his 78-year-old former campaign manager at 3.15 in the morning, begging for £5,000 to pay off “bad people” who are holding him against his will. The 52-year-old MP, who had previously raided £14,000 from campaign funds to pay “medical bills”, denies any wrongdoing, but stands down. A group of runaway Household Cavalry horses gallop through traffic in London after being spooked by building works and throwing their riders.
May
Humza Yousaf announces his resignation as First Minister of Scotland, paving the way for the SNP’s second leadership contest in less than 14 months. His departure was precipitated by his decision to tear up a power- sharing deal with the SNP’s junior coalition partner, the Scottish Greens, who promptly responded by backing a vote of no confidence in him. John Swinney is later chosen to replace him. The Tories suffer their worst set of local election results in decades. They also do badly in the mayoral contests, with Andy Street losing by a narrow margin in the West Midlands. The sole Tory victor is Ben Houchen, Mayor for the Tees Valley. The MP for Dover, Natalie Elphicke, defects to Labour, to the disgruntlement of some Labour backbenchers. In an interview with Piers Morgan, a Scottish woman by the name of Fiona Harvey outs herself as being the model for “Martha”, the stalker in the purportedly true-life Netflix drama “Baby Reindeer”. But she denies that she stalked the drama’s writer and star, Richard Gadd, complains of being “hounded” online and begins legal action. The Tory MP Craig Mackinlay receives a standing ovation on his return to the Commons, eight months after he was rushed to hospital with sepsis, which resulted in him having his hands and feet amputated. Scarlett Johansson publicly rebukes the artificial intelligence firm OpenAI for launching a chatbot with a voice “eerily similar” to her own. The actress had previously refused a request by OpenAI founder Sam Altman – a fan of the film “Her”, in which she voiced the character of an AI assistant – to use her voice. To the horror of some in his party, Rishi Sunak calls a snap election. He makes his announcement outside No. 10 in the pouring rain, while a protester blasts out New Labour’s 1997 victory anthem. Paula Vennells, the former Post Office chief executive dubbed “the most hated woman in Britain” over her role in the Horizon IT scandal, testifies before the Post Office Inquiry. Donald Trump becomes the first former US president to be convicted of a criminal offence when a New York jury finds him guilty of falsifying business records over a $130,000 payment made to the adult-film actress Stormy Daniels. In a historic election in South Africa, the ruling ANC party fails to win a majority for the first time since 1994.
June
Less than a fortnight after saying that he planned to sit out the UK general election, Nigel Farage stuns Westminster by announcing that he has decided to return to front-line politics, by taking over as leader of his Reform UK party for the next five years. Lib Dem leader Ed Davey keeps his party in the spotlight by staging a series of larky photo opportunities, in which he falls off paddle boards, descends water slides and freewheels down steep hills. The Tory campaign, meanwhile, goes from bad to worse when Sunak is condemned for leaving the D-Day 80th anniversary commemorations early. The Tories are thrown into further disarray by a string of reports about party insiders having bet on the date of the general election. In India’s election, Narendra Modi‘s Bharatiya Janata Party suffers a surprise rebuff, losing its parliamentary majority. Edinburgh becomes a sea of pink cowboy hats and sequined outerwear as Taylor Swift‘s Eras, the highest-grossing tour of all time, begins its UK leg at Murrayfield Stadium. Ian McKellen is taken to hospital after falling off the stage during a performance in the West End. The 85-year-old actor was appearing as Falstaff in “Player Kings” when he lost his footing during a fight scene. President Macron stuns France by calling snap parliamentary elections after his centrist Renaissance party is trounced by the far-right National Rally (RN) in the European elections. His gamble fails, dramatically, when the RN, led by Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella, win the first round of the election. After more than five years in HMP Belmarsh, and seven years confined to the Ecuadorean embassy in London, the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange walks free following a plea deal with the US.
