Prepare yourself, it’s going to be a dull year after all the excitement of 2016

Brexit talks will grind on, Trump won’t live up to dire Leftist predictions, and elections in Europe will end in anticlimax

The year 2017 is going to be the one that dares to be dull. Those pundits predicting doom and catastrophe, especially in the Left-wing media, are doing so partly because they want to refight the Brexit and Trump struggles long after both armies have left the battlefield.

Do not look for cataclysmic disasters in the coming year, just a lot of hard work and quiet advances. In that sense, it’s going to be the most boring year since 1993, but it will be tailor-made for Theresa May, because it’s going to be steady, serious and post-cathartic. After all the excitements of 2016, we need a quiet 2017 like a black coffee on the morning New Year’s Day, and we will get it.

That said, British politics could be shaken by a Conservative victory in the Copeland constituency in Cumbria early in the year.

With the Tories chasing a mere 2,564 Labour majority in a seat that voted Leave by 62 per cent, the by-election might produce yet another disaster for Jeremy Corbyn, but it will only matter if it persuades the supremely cautious Prime Minister to call a general election in order to provide Britain with a single, unanswerable voice during the Brexit negotiations. Yet even that election might get dull, as a large Conservative majority is utterly predictable, given Corbyn himself, Tim Farron’s weediness, a Ukip shorn of its central raison d’être, and a credible demand for a mandate from a Prime Minister who is only in No 10 due to the votes of fewer than 200 Tory MPs.

Once Article 50 is triggered – which is going to happen by the end of March, even if the Supreme Court decides in favour of parliamentary sovereignty, because every Labour MP will have the prospect of another Copeland before them as they vote – our civil servants are going to have to work a lot harder for the next two years. They were always hard-working enough when the EU wanted anything done, when there were innocent grocers using imperial weights and measures who needed to be bullied, and so on, so now they can work just as hard in their own country’s interests in the Brexit negotiations. Meanwhile, those Remainers who now pretend that their absurdly dire predictions about the British economy were only meant to apply to the post-Brexit period in 2019 should be asked why in that case an “Emergency Budget” was being prepared for last summer?

This 12-month yawnathon will be replicated abroad when Donald Trump – for all his undoubted personal oafishness – does not turn out to be the sinister Dr Strangelove figure that the overtly pro-Hillary yet covertly anti-American Left-wing media is currently making him out to be. On January 20 the long, drawling tides of American drift and surrender under Barack Obama will finally come to a close. It was wonderful that the United States elected its first black president, one who went on to kill Osama bin Laden, but the rest of this presidency has been a series of pre-emotive cringes and disappointments, as well as the tragedy of nearly half a million killed under his watch in Syria. He created messianic expectations for himself in the 2008 election that probably nobody could fulfil, least of all him.

By total contrast, if Trump even does nothing at all it will be seen as a huge advance on the dire predictions of the American Left. If he doesn’t build any kind of genuine wall on the Rio Grande, and ban Muslims from flying to the US, and imprison Hillary Clinton, but instead does pursue Keynesianism – which his enemies on the Left won’t call Keynesianism because they can’t bear to admit that it is – then he will beat all expectations. Several of his picks are excellent, such as General James Mattis at defence and KT McFarland as deputy national security adviser. If he made John Bolton deputy secretary of state it would be a further indication that the administration was taking foreign affairs seriously.

If the US does move its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, then we should, too; it’s long been ludicrous having an embassy in a different city from the government it’s accredited to. Similarly, if President Trump decides to observe the Iranian nuclear deal to the letter, which means it collapsing over Iran’s repeated and UN-verified violations of heavy water production limits, then we should support that, too. One of the few interesting things that 2017 might witness is a renaissance in the Special Relationship, as well as a long-overdue coming together of the CANZUK counties (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, UK) over free trade and the free movement of peoples.

In Europe, further anticlimaxes can be expected in 2017. In France Marine Le Pen will suffer precisely the same fate in April as her father did in 2002, when the Socialists voted for Jacques Chirac en masse. Assuming the German intelligence services don’t continue to impersonate the Keystone Kops in the manner that they have in Berlin recently, and there are no further Isil massacres perpetrated by Islamists whom Angela Merkel invited into Germany last year, she, too, will probably win in September. Negotiating Brexit while these elections are fought, as well as others in Holland, Serbia and the Czech Republic, will be tricky, but a lot easier if we go for a hard Brexit, rather than a soft one that requires unanimity among the 27 EU members.

It will also be yet another year in which Nicola Sturgeon huffs and puffs and then does nothing remarkable to damage the UK. In that, she resembles those Remainer chief executives who constantly threaten to move their banks to Europe – that is, until they study the details of the EU Social Chapter and Working Time Directive.

We must expect cyber-attacks from China, Russia and North Korea to increase, at least for as long as the West continues to refuse to retaliate by publishing the bank account details of their leaders and leaders’ families and cronies. And, of course, 2017 will see at least one major Unexpected Occurrence which no pundit will have predicted but all will afterwards explain was inevitable.

Even the eventual, grinding, tortuous (in every sense) and unbelievably bloody “victory” of President Assad in Syria will not be surprising in 2017, considering the fate of Aleppo, the strength of the Russian and Iranian forces behind him and the weak and fissiparous nature of those opposing him. It won’t be a genuine victory, of course, because the Gulf States will continue to destabilise the country, but it will be the least unexpected geostrategic development of the year. Assad’s victory will bring Iranian regional hegemony over the entire land area between the Iran-Iraq border and the Mediterranean. If President Obama had enforced his “red lines” over the regime’s chemical weapon use in 2012, events could have gone differently, but that was not in the nature of the man.

So settle down for an uneventful 2017, at least relatively speaking. One can’t expect every year to be exciting as 2016 was, one in which Britain voted to recapture her sovereign independence after nearly half a century. That’s unlikely to be bettered any time soon.