Looking ahead to a year of formulaic, unpredictable certainty… perhaps

All bets are off following the surprising events of 2017, but 2018 promises plenty of twists and turns

proclamations of mutual regard. This pattern will be repeated at least half a dozen times, always with the same formula – because economic reality must prevail over political vanity – but the ending will always come as a “surprise” to most of the media.

On the first few occasions, the happy denouement will create euphoric relief in the country at large. Then everybody will get the hang of it and become bored.

Partly as a consequence of this ritual, Theresa May’s leadership will not face any serious challenge from within her party except briefly in the bad moments when everybody will be led to believe (temporarily) that we are doomed. As a further consequence, of course, there will be little talk of an early general election. So Jeremy Corbyn and his team of Seventies revivalists will seem more and more irrelevant and his children’s army of followers will have time to grow up before any further electoral test. In truth, the chances of his being replaced as leader before the next general election are – I am going right out on a limb here – actually greater than those of Mrs May’s, even though his Stalinist operation is, at the moment, seizing the levers of the Labour party machine.

In spite of believing that the extremists within Labour will, sooner than you might think, be edged out of power, I do not regard it as likely that we will see the revival of a dedicated centrist party. The Liberal Democrats really do seem to be dying in their present incarnation. A truly refreshed moderate-liberal presence could only be established by a quite new force on the scene. New parties generally take an electoral generation to gain legitimacy but things can sometimes move faster in particularly favourable circumstances. For either of these prognostications to be plausible – the replacing of the Corbynite Labour leadership and the rise of a forceful new centre party – some very strong personalities will have to appear out of the fog and they will have to embody a muscular set of beliefs rather than mushy consensus. As things stand, there are none who leap immediately to mind but history sometimes springs surprises.

Across the Atlantic, there will be paralysis rather than drama.

Donald Trump will not be impeached. Even the Democrats, who are expected to win a majority in the House in 2018, would see the impeachment process as a waste of time, increasing partisan bitterness for little popular gain. But if the Democrats do win control of Congress, the Trump presidency will be caught in the most monumental Washington gridlock of all time (“like you’ve never seen before” as the man himself might put it). This will marginalise Trump’s presidency and render it ineffectual, which could be the best possible outcome – or the worst, depending on how dangerously enraged he becomes in the process.

That word “marginalisation” – tame as it may sound – may be the answer to many of the alarming dilemmas that have preoccupied our national conscience over this past year. I am fairly confident, for example, that it will not be possible to create legal controls on the content of social media either in terms of transmitting fake news or spewing out streams of insane invective.

Any law comprehensive enough to be effective would present a threat to freedom of speech and comment. But

at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion the influence of all this bile and falsehood could be vastly reduced by being discredited and ridiculed: when Twitter storms become risible, and the outlandish “news” output of vexatious fringe outfits so openly exposed that they can be dismissed, the problem will fade into obscurity.

What we need is a new species of deadly satire: perhaps this generation’s equivalent of Harry Enfield’s Eighties Loadsamoney character who lives entirely in the virtual world created by his smartphone and fails to see the physical reality around him. What cannot be outlawed might be laughed off the stage.

On a not-unrelated note, what shocked me most over this past year were not the concrete developments – the startling general election result or the rise of a Marxist Labour leadership. It was the explicit, brazen loathing expressed by the country’s most privileged class for ordinary people.

The British tradition of social conscience has always been based on sympathy and concern for those with fewer advantages – socially, materially or educationally – than oneself. This moral mission was embodied in radicalism on the Left and in paternalism on the Right. It informed the Victorian social reformers and through the 20th century, it protected this country from the great waves of populist demagoguery that swept the European continent.

Maybe this open contempt for whole swathes of the population who dared to defy the received wisdom on Brexit and speak for their own communities, will be shamed into silence in the new year.

Then again, maybe not.

The chances of Corbyn being replaced as leader before the next general election are greater than Mrs May’s