People of the year 2024

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.

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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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.

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.

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.

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.

Keir Starmer moves into Downing Street following Labour’s landslide victory in the general election. His party emerges with 412 seats; the Tories are left with just 121. Among the Tories rejected by their constituents are Grant Shapps, Penny Mordaunt, Jacob Rees-Mogg and former PM Liz Truss, who converted her 26,000 majority in South West Norfolk to a loss, in the largest swing to Labour ever recorded. Nigel Farage, on the other hand, finally wins a seat, on his eighth attempt. Donald Trump is photographed pumping the air with his fist, seconds after narrowly avoiding an assassin’s bullet at a rally in Pennsylvania. Days later, he is greeted at the Republican convention – where his nomination is confirmed – to chants of “Fight, fight, fight!” Four months after becoming the first black leader of any European nation, Vaughan Gething announces his resignation as First Minister of Wales, having failed to fend off persistent questions about his acceptance of donations from a disgraced businessman. At Wimbledon, Carlos Alcaraz demolishes Novak Djokovic in the final. In the wake of his disastrously befuddled performance in a TV debate with Trump, Joe Biden abandons his re-election campaign and throws his support behind Vice-President Kamala Harris, who rapidly secures the endorsement of enough delegates to win the Democrat nomination. Trump reacts by calling Biden “the worst president by far in the history of our country”, and by claiming that Harris will be “easier to beat”. He subsequently chooses J.D. Vance as his running mate. At Southwark Crown Court, a judge doles out long prison sentences to five Just Stop Oil protesters who had organised demonstrations that brought the M25 to a standstill. Roger Hallam, the co-founder of the group, is given a five-year term for conspiracy to cause public nuisance. An IT update by the cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike causes Microsoft Windows to crash, leading to global chaos. Millions of people working in everything from hospitality to banking turn on their computers, only to be greeted by the “blue screen of death”. Thousands of GP surgeries are unable to access medical records or make referrals; some hospitals are forced to cancel appointments for cancer treatments; and airports have to resort to displaying flight information on whiteboards. The Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, accuses the Tories of having left an “unforgivable” £22 billion “black hole” in the public finances, as she sets out a series of spending cuts, including the scrapping of winter fuel payments for the 10 million or so pensioners who don’t receive means-tested benefits.

The UK reels from seven days of far-right rioting sparked by the killing of three young girls in a knife attack in Southport. Western leaders scramble to defuse tensions in the Middle East following the assassination of two leaders of Iran’s “axis of resistance”: Fuad Shukr, Hezbollah’s top military commander; and Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas. The XXXIII Olympiad, in Paris, had begun with an ambitious, open-air ceremony marred by rain, in which a metal horse ran down the Seine, and Celine Dion sang from the Eiffel Tower. Highlights of the Games include an astonishing comeback by the US gymnast Simone Biles, the swimming feats of Frenchman Léon Marchand – and an unintentionally comic routine by the Australian breakdancer Rachael Louise Gunn (Raygun). Andy Murray bows out of professional tennis after playing his final game at the event. Charlotte Dujardin, the British dressage star and six-time Olympic medallist, had pulled out of Paris 2024 after a video emerged of her repeatedly whipping a horse. In the biggest prisoner swap since the Cold War, 16 people, including Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, are freed by Russia, in exchange for eight Russians. President Zelenskyy says the war is “coming home” to Russia after Ukraine mounts a surprise counterattack into Russia’s Kursk region. Nasa confirms that, owing to problems with one of its craft, the astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore, who arrived on the International Space Station in June for what was supposed to be an eight-day visit, will have to remain in space until February. The British tech tycoon Mike Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter, Hannah, die along with five other people when his superyacht, the Bayesian, sinks in a storm off the coast of Sicily. Kamala Harris and her folksy running mate, Tim Walz, enjoy an ecstatic reception at the Democratic National Convention amid talk of “Kamalamania”. Liam and Noel Gallagher announce that they’ve put aside their differences for an Oasis tour next year; but fans’ joy turns to anger when they spend hours in glitchy online queues, and find that, owing to “dynamic pricing”, they are asked to pay as much as £350 per ticket.

In a glossy video, the Princess of Wales reveals that she has completed her chemotherapy treatment, and is planning a limited return to public engagements. VP Harris is widely hailed as the winner of a televised debate in which a blustering Trump repeats an unfounded rumour that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, are eating people’s pets; they’re “eating the dogs; they’re eating the cats”, he says. Presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr ends his White House bid, having generated plenty of his own animal stories, which include allegedly dumping a dead bear cub in Central Park as a prank. In a court in France, Gisèle Pelicot waives her right to anonymity as her husband and 50 other men go on trial for raping her while she lay drugged and unconscious in her bedroom. “Only consequential presidents get shot at,” declares Trump after surviving a second attempt on his life. Former BBC presenter Huw Edwards is given a six-month suspended prison sentence after pleading guilty to three counts of making indecent images of children. Israel strikes a devastating blow against the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah by causing hundreds of its members’ pagers and walkie-talkies to blow up. A subsequent strike on Beirut kills more senior Hezbollah figures, including its leader Hassan Nasrallah. Climate activists throw tomato soup over two “Sunflowers” paintings by Vincent van Gogh at the National Gallery, just an hour after two others were jailed for a similar protest in 2022. The Government is engulfed in a row about freebies when it emerges that Labour donor Waheed Alli gave suits and glasses worth £20,000 to Keir Starmer, and thousands more in clothes to his wife, Victoria, and his deputy, Angela Rayner. In a BBC documentary, more than 20 women accuse the late Harrods owner Mohamed Al Fayed of sexual abuse including rape; hundreds of other witnesses have since come forward.

In retaliation for Nasrallah’s killing, Iran fires around 180 ballistic missiles at Israel, prompting fears of full-blown war in the Middle East. On the last day of the Tory conference in Birmingham, the four remaining leadership candidates – Robert Jenrick, Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat – each deliver a 20-minute speech. Cleverly uses his to urge his party to be “more normal”, and is regarded as the star of the show, but owing to botched tactical voting by his supporters, he is excluded from the final run-off, which is won by Badenoch. A power struggle in Downing Street between Sue Gray, Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, and Morgan McSweeney, the PM’s chief political adviser, ends with Gray’s departure. Geoffrey Hinton, the British-Canadian scientist sometimes known as the “godfather of AI”, wins the Nobel Prize in physics, with his American colleague John Hopfield. Former Chelsea manager Thomas Tuchel is appointed as the new England manager, replacing Gareth Southgate. Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar is killed by Israeli forces in southern Gaza, ending a year-long manhunt for the architect of the 7 October attacks. After being fired on by IDF forces on routine patrol, he had taken shelter in a damaged building where he was later found, reportedly dressed in military fatigues and holding an AK-47. Fans around the world mourn the death of the 31-year-old One Direction singer Liam Payne after he falls from a hotel balcony in Buenos Aires. Rachel Reeves announces £40 billion of tax rises in her long-awaited Budget; she says the package will help “fix the foundations” of the economy and spur growth.

With the help of Elon Musk – his new cheerleader and the self-proclaimed “First Buddy” – Donald Trump wins an emphatic victory in the US presidential election, sealing a historic return to the White House as America’s 47th president. Among his controversial cabinet picks is Fox News anchor Pete Hegseth, who is proposed as secretary of defence. Spain’s King Felipe and Queen Letizia are heckled and pelted with mud while visiting a flood-stricken town in Valencia. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, resigns in the wake of a report into the Church of England’s poor handling of an abuse scandal involving the barrister and prominent evangelical Christian John Smyth. Jeremy Clarkson joins thousands of farmers in London to protest against the partial withdrawal of inheritance tax relief on farms. William Hague replaces Chris Patten as chancellor of Oxford University after beating a large field of candidates, including Peter Mandelson and Elish Angiolini. As Israel and Hezbollah agree to a tentative ceasefire in Lebanon, the International Criminal Court issues an arrest warrant for Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, accusing them of, inter alia, using starvation as a tool of war in Gaza. A historic bill proposed by Labour MP Kim Leadbeater, which would legalise assisted dying in England and Wales for terminally ill patients, clears its first hurdle in the House of Commons.

Keir Starmer announces a new “Plan for Change”, in a bid to get his faltering government back on track. Gregg Wallace steps away from his presenting role on “MasterChef” after the BBC receives complaints about alleged misconduct, including telling “sexualised” jokes. President Biden offers a sweeping pardon to his son, Hunter. The brutal Assad regime is brought to a sudden end when Syrian rebels seize Damascus following a lightning offensive. President Bashar al-Assad and his family take refuge in Moscow. South Korea’s embattled president, Yoon Suk Yeol, declares martial law, but is forced to backtrack hours later and now faces impeachment.