Britain was barely 24 hours into the new year of 2024 when dark clouds rolled in. Storm Henk killed two people and ripped open a pod on the London Eye as a family of 11 clung on inside, 400ft in the air.
Three weeks later, Storm Isha battered the country. The next day Storm Jocelyn did the same. If weather can be a harbinger of the national political mood, then after 14 years of Tory rule it was clear the winds of change were howling.
Early in January, then prime minister Rishi Sunak confirmed voters would go to the polls in the “second half of the year,” which turned out to be true – but only just.
While an election had been wholly expected, 2024 had plenty of other shocks in store for Britain. Here are eight key moments from across society and politics that defined the year.
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February 2nd – Teenage killers of Brianna Ghey unmasked
Every few years a particularly shocking crime causes a nation to look deep into its soul. When that crime is the murder of a child by other children, the soul-searching is deeper still. The brutal murder of 16-year-old transgender girl Brianna Ghey by two 15-year-olds in the Cheshire village of Culcheth shook Britain in a way it hadn’t experienced since the killing of little James Bulger 30 years before.
Ghey’s murder took place in February 2023. A year later the country prepared to come face to face with her killers for the first time at their sentencing. Britons looked at Scarlett Jenkinson and Eddie Ratcliffe, the unremarkable youths who lured Ghey to a park to stab her, and wondered – why?
“I can explain,” said Ratcliffe as he was arrested the next day by officers who found a knife in his bedroom. He never did explain – by the time the court case arrived, the mildly autistic youngster had become mute. It was Jenkinson, meanwhile, who had planned the senseless killing of her vulnerable friend Ghey. Ratcliffe was sentenced to a minimum of 20 years in prison while Jenkinson, who has expressed a desire to kill again, will serve at least 22 years. The judge said they may never be freed.
February 6th – Cancer casts a dark shadow
The novelty many Britons felt at having a new monarch was dislodged by shock barely five weeks into the new year, when it was announced that King Charles had an unspecified form of cancer that had been discovered during treatment for prostate issues. Buckingham Palace said he would step back from public duties for treatment but he was “wholly positive” about his future.
A few weeks later, he would have a phone call with President Michael D Higgins, who warned him that doctors would probably tell him that prostate issues bring “mild discomfort”. Such a description was “one of the greatest abuses of the English language”, the president told a laughing Charles.
On March 22nd, it emerged that not only did Britain’s new king have cancer, but so did its future queen. Kate Middleton (42), the princess of Wales, announced she was undergoing a course of chemotherapy for cancer that had been discovered in January, shortly before the king’s.
Both royals disappeared from public view, although the king – seemingly always smiling – still popped his head up occasionally; the public mood around his daughter-in-law’s illness always seemed more sombre. Both royals tentatively re-emerged in public towards the end of the year.
April 29th, July 16th – Political turmoil in Scotland and Wales
The Scottish National Party’s Humza Yousaf (39) was the first Muslim leader of a western nation when he took over from Nicola Sturgeon as first minister. Barely a year into his premiership, which had already been roiled by SNP financial scandals, he was forced to resign in ignominy when he botched the ending of his party’s government’s partnership with the Scottish Greens.
Yousaf (39) said he’d stick with the deal when he first came under pressure from SNP colleagues who blamed the Greens for dragging the government too far to the left. Then without warning, he sacked the two Green ministers and said the SNP would go it alone as a minority administration.
The furious Greens said they would back a motion of no confidence in his leadership. Yousaf bowed to the inevitable and tearfully announced his resignation at Bute House.
Meanwhile in Cardiff, the new Welsh first minister Vaughan Gething, who had replaced Mark Drakeford four months previously, was forced out of office in a row over deleted Covid WhatsApp messages. As with his fellow first minister Yousaf in Scotland in April, Gething was reduced to tears – in May when he lost a confidence vote. Under pressure from his own Senned (Welsh parliament) Labour colleagues to quit, he held out until July 16th before bowing to the inevitable.
July 4th – Labour sweeps to power in landslide election victory
Technically, Sunak stuck to his word that the election would be in the second half of the year by calling a snap poll for the first Thursday of July. Yet all of Westminster, which had been expecting a November election, was still stunned as announced the date in the pouring rain outside Number 10.
It turned out that Sunak’s sodden start was nowhere near the nadir of the campaign and the Tory party was less well prepared for the six-week campaign than its rival Labour under Keir Starmer.
Labour ran a slick campaign hyper-focused on winning back voters who had switched to Boris Johnson’s Tories in 2019. Sunak, meanwhile, stumbled from one gaffe to another, such as his inexplicable decision to leave a D-Day event early and return from France to Britain to do a TV interview. In a nation where the veneration of war dead is taken seriously, it was politically ruinous.
As Labour rebuilt its so-called Red Wall of seats in working-class north of England seats, the Liberal Democrats attacked the Blue Wall Tory heartlands in the south of England, ending up with a record 72 seats. Ed Davey’s party received fewer votes, however, than right wing anti-immigration party Reform UK, whose leader Nigel Farage became an MP in Clacton at the eighth time of asking. Reform, however, won only five seats overall, but finished second to Labour in more than 80 constituencies, suggesting it could pose a serious challenge to Labour’s working-class hegemony at the next election.
Despite winning a smaller share of the vote than Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour in 2017, Starmer’s party recorded a thumping landslide win with 412 seats compared with the Tories’ 121. It was helped by a rout in Scotland of the SNP, which lost 80 per cent of its seats and was left with just nine.
“Whether you voted Labour or not – especially if you did not – I say to you directly: my government will serve you,” said Starmer, as he entered Downing Street. This was, however, no re-run of the elation of Tony Blair’s 1997 victory. Britain’s public services and economy are creaking and Starmer warned of tough decisions ahead. Barely six months on, his government is already unpopular.
Sunak, meanwhile, took responsibility for his party’s shellacking and quit. Right-wing firebrand former business secretary Kemi Badenoch replaced him in November after a long leadership campaign during which immigration was the main issue, as the Tories fretted over the Reform threat.
July 30th – Anti-immigration riots spread across Britain after children stabbed
The new government did not have long to wait for its first big test, which erupted on to British streets in an intimidating physical manifestation of the anti-immigration feelings that had tainted UK politics for much of the last decade.
Riots, many of which targeted refugees, spread across the country at the height of summer after three young girls were stabbed to death in Southport. The violence was fuelled by misinformation online suggesting the stabbings had been carried out by an asylum seeker. It lasted almost a week. By the end of the summer close to 1,500 had been arrested, at least 800 charged and hundreds jailed.
The senselessness of some rioter’s actions was revealed at their court hearings. The Irish Times observed the Sheffield court proceedings of a slew of those convicted for attacking a Holiday Inn hotel near Rotherham that housed refugees. One rioter, grandfather Peter Lynch (61) from Wath-upon-Dearne, whimpered and appeared bereft as he waited on video-link to hear his fate – he was sentenced to two years and eight months in prison. Lynch was found hanged in his cell in October.
July 31st – BBC’s Huw Edwards admits making child abuse images
In his lilting Welsh accent, former television newsreader Edwards was invariably called upon to deliver the biggest news stories to the British public – he famously announced the death of Queen Elizabeth during a live report in 2022.
His career had already effectively ended in disgrace after he was revealed in 2023 to have exchanged lurid messages and pictures with a youngster whose parents said was vulnerable, sparking a mental health crisis for Edwards.
The story took a darker twist this summer, however, when police confirmed he was charged with “making” – a reference to receiving on WhatsApp – 41 images of child abuse. Edwards pleaded guilty and in September received a suspended six months jail term. The BBC scrubbed him from its archives, with the exception of his announcement of the queen’s death due to its historic significance.
September 4th – Grenfell fire report reveals litany of official wrongdoing
“It should never have happened. The country failed to discharge its most fundamental duty to protect you and your loved ones, the people that we are here to serve, and I am deeply sorry.”
So said Starmer in the House of Commons, after the final report on the Grenfell Tower fire disaster of 2017 revealed the full extent of the establishment neglect that led to the death of 72 people in an inferno at a London high-rise block of flats.
Irish insulation products supplier Kingspan was among the companies criticised in the final report, while the inquiry also found that the government had long been aware of the fire risk at high-rise towers due to the use of unsuitable cladding materials, but ministers had failed to act.
“To some, the inquiry has given answers. For others, it just puts an extra nail in the coffin, or in the heart,” said Hisam Choucair (46), who lost his mother, sister, her three young daughters and their father in the fire. He was forced to watch from the ground below as the blaze took hold. “Words cannot describe the pain I have felt.”
November 29th – House of Commons votes on the right to die
Nine years ago MPs roundly rejected a proposal to give terminally ill people the right to seek medical assistance to end their lives. One who has voted in favour was a then-rookie MP, former human rights lawyer Keir Starmer. Almost a decade later, as prime minister he gave his MPs a free vote on a fresh proposal brought forward in a private member’s Bill by Labour’s Kim Leadbeater.
Critics of the proposal argued that it would fundamentally change the relationship between the state and citizens of England and Wales, where its provisions would apply. But after an emotional House of Commons debate, the landmark Bill passed a crucial vote by 330 votes to 275.
It will now go forward for further parliamentary scrutiny, where opponents will try to water down the provisions, which allow those with less than six months to live be provided with drugs to end their lives with the say-so of two doctors and a high court judge. But the principle – that doctors can help some patients end their lives – is on course set to be established, a huge change for Britain.
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