From Charli to Jilly to Moo Deng the hippo: the faces we won’t forget from 2024
POLITICS
Benjamin Netanyahu
Israel’s longest-serving prime minister ends the year under an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, and taking the stand in a long-delayed corruption trial at home.
Yet Benjamin Netanyahu is also in a stronger political position than most of his critics expected
The 7 October attack on Israel by Hamas happened on his watch, but he has defied calls for a state commission of inquiry to investigate security failures that left the country so vulnerable. Unlike military commanders and intelligence officers in charge on that day, he has not apologised.
Netanyahu started 2024 facing domestic demonstrations demanding a ceasefire and hostage deal. Israel was at war in Gaza, under attack from Hezbollah in Lebanon and threatened by Iran and its allies from Yemen to Iraq.
He insisted that only “total victory” over Hamas would make the country secure. He shrugged off accusations that he was more concerned about his political future than the lives of Israeli hostages, as head of a coalition government with right-wing partners who threatened to leave if he agreed a ceasefire.
He ends the year claiming triumph over Iran and its self-proclaimed axis of resistance across the region. Hezbollah’s leadership and arsenal are in ruins, Assad has fled Syria, Hamas leaders have been killed by Israel.
Still, the image of Israel’s prime minister being grilled in court about corruption while leading a multi-front conflict with troops on the ground in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria is a jarring one. Nearly half the country thinks Netanyahu cannot effectively function as a wartime leader while giving testimony, recent polling found.
He has responded, as he habitually does, by going on the attack with a media campaign effectively painting himself as a martyr to unpatriotic enemies. His ruthless political instincts have focused, critics say, on his own survival. This year they appear to have served him well in the short term, though the long-term cost to Netanyahu and his country is still unclear. Emma Graham-Harrison
Rachel Reeves
If there is one UK politician who has shot from relative obscurity to household name in 2024, it is Rachel Reeves.
Ever since she became an MP in 2010, Reeves had yearned to be the first woman chancellor of the exchequer. She would joke to friends about mentioning her work as a Bank of England economist at least once in every speech to make sure people knew she had the pedigree.
It is a post that has existed some 800 years without a woman having been put in charge of the nation’s finances.
On 5 June 2024, the 45-year-old entered the Treasury to rapturous applause, having made history. It was a great day for women in politics, she told her civil servants.
She was not always Keir Starmer’s first choice to run economic policy – he gave the shadow chancellorship to Anneliese Dodds. But less than a year later Reeves replaced her and began plotting her path from opposition into Threadneedle Street.
Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-budget in September 2022 was Reeves’s key moment. Reeves saw that she and Labour had the keys to Downing Street if they could convince voters they would be the exact opposite to the Tories. Labour would pledge to keep a tight grip on spending and not put up taxes on working people. She would also promise the highest growth in the G7 by investing in a green revolution.
Now, after the general election, Reeves is confronting the realities of high office. Being chancellor with an economy dragging along the bottom is no breeze. Everyone has demands on you and blames you for what goes wrong. In her first budget, Reeves decided to plug a £22bn black hole in the public finances by raising employers’ national insurance contributions. She also cut back winter fuel payments to only the poorest pensioners and retained the two-child cap on benefits. She had become Labour’s new ‘ironchancellor’. By late this year there were signs of economic growth slowing, not growing, and that job vacancies were declining.
2024 gave us our first woman chancellor. But Reeves knows the next two or three years will present a still bigger test. Toby Helm
Kemi Badenoch
Anyone who navigates Westminster’s pitfalls to seize the leadership of their party has had a year to remember. But in Kemi Badenoch’s case, she was one of very few Conservative politicians to have taken anything positive from a year that has proved to be the most bruising in the party’s long history.
After a disastrous early election campaign that saw Rishi Sunak’s premiership end in crushing defeat, Badneoch was immediately a frontrunner in the race to lead a rebuild in opposition. Having forged an image as an anti-woke, no-nonsense culture warrior since entering parliament in 2017, she had built up a fan base in the party after an ultimately unsuccessful leadership bid to replace Boris Johnson in 2022.
After Sunak’s demise, Badenoch found herself playing a different role. Rather than being the insurgent candidate, she was seen as the figure capable of appealing to the right while also being tolerated by the party’s mainstream.
There is no question that appointing her as leader is a gamble at a critical moment for the Tories. Her often deliberately abrasive style will ensure she gains attention – often the hardest trick to pull off for opposition leaders. But her attacks on actor David Tennant or her claim that some civil servants should be in prison cause more problems than they solve. Poor approval ratings for both her and her party mean Badenoch needs a productive 2025 to begin the recovery. Michael Savage
Emmanuel Macron
It was a year of highs and lows for the French president. Doomsayers and drenching rain at the opening ceremony failed to dampen the success of the Paris Olympics and Paralympics, hailed as a triumph by even cynical Parisians. The reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral in five years, as Macron promised on the night of the devastating fire in April 2019, was a triumph of presidential will, collective spirit and an army of French artisans. The lows, however, were of Macron’s making. After he called an ill-advised snap election, his centrist government lost its majority and had to resign and there is ongoing political paralysis. Kim Willsher
Nigel Farage
It’s a face more often seen at Mar-a-Lago than Clacton-on-Sea, but Nigel Farage had something else to gurn about in 2024 when he was elected to represent Britain’s most Brexity seaside town in parliament, his eighth attempt to become an MP. During that election campaign I spent a dispiriting day in Jaywick, the wild-west end of that constituency, asking residents exactly what they saw in the pin-striped populist, to be repeatedly told versions of that lie: he’s the only one on our side.
A dozen years ago I had followed Farage on his neverending tour of town hall meetings, whipping up Ukip anger about wind farms and Brussels bureaucracy. At the time, not long after the election of David Cameron’s coalition government, the politician seemed messianic about the prospects of his one-man party. He sensed and nurtured the hardening of British attitudes on the centre right in those gatherings; the feeling, shaped by austerity, in home counties village halls and left-behind towns, that “Westminster” had nothing to say to them. He predicted to me then: “I would think in the next four to five years we will … succeed in realigning a segment of the British political scene.”
He has, fatefully, succeeded. The referendum, his pound-shop “independence day”, tore the country in half and in the fallout, as he predicted, the great electoral force of the Tory party has crashed and burned, with Farage emerging from the wreckage. Successive Conservative prime ministers post-2016 attempted to cosplay versions of his populism. Only a few months into the Labour landslide government, voices are already muttering, in the way that they have now muttered for a dozen years, that their primary task is finding ways to counter Farage’s stubborn hold on a large part of the nation’s political imagination. That task will not be made easier by Farage’s pending alliance with the Trump government and Elon Musk. Loathe him or loathe him, his is the face that refuses to go away. Tim Adams
HEROES
Gisèle Pelicot