So long, 2016: the year of the political earthquake

But if the Tories leadership race was unedifying, Labour MPs could only look on with envy. Incensed by Jeremy Corbyns absenteeism during the referendum campaign, more than 60 resigned from the shadow front bench, and days later 172 voted no confidence in their leader. Corbynistas retaliated with a torrent of online abuse, much of it violent and misogynistic, and a brick through leadership challenger Angela Eagles window put paid to any hope of a kinder, gentler politics. After an inflammatory summer of courtroom battles, allegations of MI5 infiltrators, rock star-style Corbyn rallies and squabbles over a 25 fee to vote, Corbyn was duly re-elected Labour leader, and promptly vanished from view again.

Historians will probably argue for ever about why we voted to leave the EU, but none could conclude that immigration played little part. The 58% spike in hate crimes that followed the vote only confirmed what the result had already told us: our compassion for migrants had curdled into fearful hostility as the crisis in mainland Europe spiralled. Hungary declared a nationwide state of emergency, and Italy replaced Greece as the people traffickers destination of choice, with 180,000 reaching its shores this year. The likelihood of drowning while crossing the Med narrowed from the previous years record of one in 269, to just one in 88; but sympathy hardened as the crisis became fatally entwined in public minds with the Islamic terror attacks rocking the continent.

Seven of the nine jihadis who attacked Paris late last year, killing 130, were reported to have smuggled themselves into Europe disguised as Syrian refugees. In March, Brussels became the next target, when bombs at the airport and a metro station killed more than 30 and injured 300. But July was to be the deadliest month: Bastille Day celebrations on a balmy night in Nice became a massacre when a Tunisian man drove a truck into the crowds, killing 86 and injuring more than 400. Twelve days later, two 19-year-old jihadis forced an 85-year-old priest to kneel at his own altar in a Normandy church and slit his throat. In Germany, an Afghan asylum seeker ran amok with an axe on a train, a Syrian refugee blew up a wine bar, another hacked a colleague to death with a machete, and a German-Iranian teenage gunman went on a rampage, killing nine. Earlier this week, a Tunisian asylum seeker was was shot dead by Italian police after being identified as the man who drove a truck into a Berlin Christmas market, killing at least 12 people.

Measures that would only recently have been unthinkable were passed with little public protest. Denmark introduced a law authorising the confiscation of jewellery and cash from asylum seekers to pay for their care, undeterred by UN warnings against fuelling fear and xenophobia. French seaside resorts imposed a burkini ban, leading to the surreal spectacle of armed policemen ordering Muslim women on beaches to undress, which was reversed not by public revulsion (opinion polls found two-thirds of French people in favour) but a court ruling. When the migrant camp in Calais was bulldozed, Britain agreed to take its unaccompanied minors, only for our tabloids to whip up outrage about arrivals who didnt look under 18. A Tory backbencher proposed subjecting them to dental tests, to determine if they were deserving of British kindness.

The three biggest nationalities pouring into Europe were fleeing conflicts caused by events long predating 2016 and not confined within their borders. Fifteen years after western coalition forces first sought revenge for 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq remain locked in bloody turmoil, but it was the tragedy of Syria that horrified the world this year. Five years into civil war, the president, Bashar al-Assad, remained undefeated and the international community paralysed, unable to decide which, if any, side to support.

Diplomatic scruples did not inhibit Vladimir Putin, who was all too happy to fill the vacuum. Any hope that Russian airstrikes on Syria would be confined to Isis targets soon faded as Moscow subjected eastern Aleppo to the same ruthless bombardment that had once reduced Grozny to rubble. Cluster and barrel bombs rained down on civilian homes and hospitals, even a UN aid convoy, rendering Aleppo our Guernica and killing more civilians, according to one NGO monitoring the war (the UN-sanctioned Syrian Network for Human Rights), than even Isis has. The world was shaken by footage of a shell-shocked five-year-old boy being pulled from the wreckage of his home, coated in grey dust, dazed but still it wasnt moved to act. All the world has failed us, a resident of Aleppo despaired. The city is dying. Rapidly by bombardment, and slowly by hunger and fear of the advance of the Assad regime. As the year drew to a close, the fall of Aleppo to Assad became inevitable, and from the ruins of one of the worlds oldest cities rose a resurgent Kremlin, restored as a global superpower.

A once faintly ridiculous figure, mocked in the west for his fondness for posing topless, Putin could plausibly claim to be the most influential world leader of 2016. For the first time in history, a Russian president was accused of deploying cyber warfare to influence the outcome of a US presidential election. Putin denied the CIAs charge, but few in Washington doubted that he was behind the Russian hackers who infiltrated Democratic National Committee email servers and the private email account of Hillary Clintons campaign chairman, releasing material calculated to embarrass and undermine their candidate. Her rival had even urged Moscow to hack her account: Russia, if youre listening, he declared at a press conference in July, I hope youre able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. In the words of one stunned Clinton aide: This has to be the first time that a major presidential candidate has actively encouraged a foreign power to conduct espionage against his political opponent.

But it was only one of many firsts in a US presidential election unlike any the world had seen. When Donald J Trump entered the race, few imagined the reality star and property tycoon with four business bankruptcies and two ex-wives behind him stood a chance against the most qualified Democratic candidate in history. This would be the year America elected its first female president, not the first leader of the free world to have never held public office. Pundits shook their heads and laughed back in January when Trump told a rally, I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldnt lose any voters. Who was he kidding? Every bizarre step he took towards Novembers vote was judged by sniggering pundits to be leading him farther from the White House.

Build a wall on the Mexican border to keep out all those Latino rapists? The idea was surely absurd. Punish women for having abortions? Even pro-lifers were appalled. Julys Republican Convention was meant to confer respectability on Trumps maverick campaign, but unravelled into farce after his wife, Melania, delivered a speech lifted verbatim from one Michelle Obama made eight years earlier. Matters only got worse when Trump launched a Twitter attack on the Muslim parents of a US soldier killed fighting in Iraq. The following week he suggested a Clinton presidency could be dealt with by the Second Amendment people, by which he could only mean that they assassinate her.

When a tape emerged of Trump boasting in 2005 about grabbing women by the pussy and getting away with it because he was famous, he retaliated by inviting three women who had accused Bill Clinton of inappropriate sexual conduct to the next presidential debate. The tape was nothing but locker room banter, Trump scoffed, showcasing his unparalleled gift for post-truth politics with the solemn assertion: Nobody has more respect for women than I do. He announced his intention to jail Clinton if he won. Even George W Bushs former secretary for homeland security was appalled: It smacks of what we read about tinpot dictators in other parts of the world.

Trump dismissed as liars the 12 women who came forward to accuse him of having acted out his banter. Some, he sneered, werent even good-looking enough for him to sexually assault. Look at her, he mocked one. Of another: That would not be my first choice. In the campaigns final weeks, what caution he ever had was thrown to the wind, as he led rallies in a mob chant of Lock her up!, Build that wall! and Drain the swamp! Channelling his new best friend Farage, he urged America to make 8 November our independence day.

As Noam Chomsky observed, Every time Trump makes a nasty comment about whoever, his popularity goes up. Because its based on hate, you know. Hate and fear, he warned, reminiscent of something unpleasant: Germany, not many years ago. Yet even at the 11th hour, when the FBI reopened its investigation into Clintons private email server, the polls still assured the world Trump could not win. And then, on 8 November, a man widely described as a sociopathic bully, grandiose narcissist, dangerous demagogue and pathological liar, who scored higher than Hitler in an Oxford University study of psychopathic tendencies, became the 45th president of the USA. It was indeed Brexit plus plus plus, celebrated by Americas white supremacist alt-right movement with cries of Hail Trump! and rigid one-armed Nazi salutes. In the words of veteran constitutional historian Professor Vernon Bogdanor, Trumps election was the most troubling political event in my lifetime. Its not difficult to arouse nationalist passions. We saw that in the 1930s.

The world waits to see whether President Trump will govern as he campaigned. So far he has appointed a Texan oilman and Putin ally as secretary of state, put a retired general nicknamed Mad Dog in charge of defence, a climate change denier in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency, and chosen for his chief strategist the head of Breitbart news. His foreign heroes are Putin and Farage, and his preferred medium for conducting international diplomacy is Twitter. At the very moment when Americas system of checks and balances has never been more necessary, his party controls the White House, the house and the senate.

Meanwhile, the global institutions designed to keep us safe are in trouble. The UN secretary general used to be a household name, but Ban Ki-moons only discernible achievement in eight years was to make himself and the UN so invisible that most of the world would struggle to recognise, let alone name, his successor taking office in January. (Its Antnio Guterres.) The head of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, has gone on trial in France charged with criminal negligence, and Natos member states have failed to pay their dues for so long that they could hardly be surprised by Trumps reluctance to carry on bankrolling an obsolete institution costing the US a fortune. The fourth estates future has become increasingly fragile, too, as readers and viewers defected to the raunchier wilds of social media, and politicians from left and right discovered they could escape scrutiny from the mainstream media by simply snubbing it. When Facebook is the primary source of many voters news, and a conspiracy theory as crazy as Pizzagate (which linked Hillary Clinton and other Democrats to a child-abuse network run from a Washington pizzeria) can command global attention, how the powerful will be held to account is no longer clear.

If western liberal democracy reached its high point with the fall of the Berlin Wall, by the end of this year its very survival began to look in doubt. As Timothy Garton Ash put it, 2016 was 1989 in reverse. The far right is on the rise across Europe; Marine Le Pen is a frontrunner in 2017s French presidential election; and even if Angela Merkel holds on to power next year, the anti-immigration, populist, far-right Alternative for Germany is predicted to win seats in the Bundestag. It is with this fractured and fractious EU that Britain will negotiate the terms of its departu

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