I’m predicting that Trump’s party will eject him in 2019. As for Brexit…

It was impossible to tell what 2018 would hold, but some events are starting to seem inevitable next year

Last year, faithful readers may recall, this column had to plead forgiveness for abandoning its New Year tradition of anti-predictions – that is, a list of events that would not occur in the forthcoming 12 months. The developments of 2017 had run so wildly, preposterously counter to expectations that I lost my nerve: all bets were off. Making any prognostications at all for the following year would be manifestly insane.

Well, you may or may not be pleased to hear that normal service can be resumed. Things may still be chaotic, but the pandemonium is beginning to form a recognisable shape. It is now at least within the bounds of possibility to make some reasonably confident guesses. So here we go:

There will not be a second referendum on Brexit. The campaign for this has no base of mass popular support and has been rumbled even by sympathetic media outlets as a front for Continuity Remain and a handful of vainglorious professional opportunists. Besides, its organisers – who never expected to be taken literally, seeing their operation as simply an elaborate way to stall Article 50 under cover of a faux-democratic initiative – are beginning to get cold feet, suspecting that an actual second referendum would produce a result remarkably similar to the first.

Donald Trump will not be impeached. That would be too slow and allow too much scope for partisan exhibitionism. The Republicans are going to have to deal with this problem themselves, or risk being discredited for a generation.

Trump’s removal from power – if not necessarily from office – is now becoming more urgent than was anticipated when the whole Mueller investigation thing was initiated. Proving actual collusion with Russia during the election campaign now looks like an indulgently leisurely pursuit. The last grown-ups are leaving the room. The infant in the White House has been left on his own to play with the toys – untroubled by his ignorance of military strategy, the consequences of global trade wars, or the monetary policies of the Federal Bank.

Many American voters might be parochial enough not to be concerned about isolationist withdrawal – even from Nato – but they are remarkably sophisticated about the value of their investments. Ordinary people in the United States participate in the stock market and are keenly aware of the relationship between the health of their pension funds and the state of the Dow Jones. Because the “little people” buy shares, too, there is not such a clear popular distinction between Wall Street and the “real economy” of Main Street. When the markets fall, everybody panics.

This is the real reason Trump has shut down the federal government – and blamed the Democrats for refusing to provide the funds for his border wall. (Wait a minute – wasn’t Mexico going to pay for that?) He needed a distraction from the bad news on the stock market, and the departure of his last general over the snap decision to withdraw from Syria. This is all beginning to look desperate and uncoordinated. Someone – or most probably several people – will have to move in and put an end to it. But it won’t be by a Democrat impeachment process. As I say, that would be much too plodding and ponderous.

The West will not achieve agreement on a systematic way of combating Chinese cyber-incursions and theft of intellectual property. By definition, the legal procedures and ethical assumptions of free countries are varied and in keeping with their own historical character. Hence, they will not be prepared to subsume these distinctive sets of principles under a uniform programme of surveillance which is what would be needed to provide an impenetrable wall of protection against the incursion of a determined, ruthless global predator.

Whatever protections are devised and adopted by national governments will be different from one another and probably incompatible. This will leave large holes in the security of the democratic economies. The consequences of this may be very dangerous, requiring Western countries to confront Chinese expansionism in a more visceral way.

For not dissimilar reasons, there will be no effective coordinated policy to protect Western countries from Russia’s nihilistic adventurism. The reckless poisonings, the disinformation wars, the social media fake news and the bravura lying will carry on with the utter insouciance to

at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion which we have become accustomed, as Putin and his cronies continue to make clear that they simply do not give a damn what the rest of the world thinks. The outrageousness of it is the whole point.

So long as Germany – the economic hub of the European Union – is dependent on Russia for its gas supply, and so long as the US president is an ignoramus (or fears what Moscow could reveal about him), Putin can do what he likes. And so long as what he likes is totally anarchic and unpredictable – the destruction of comprehensible order being its only object – the Western countries cannot even prepare for the next bizarre incident, let alone prevent it, without undermining their own assumptions about personal liberty.

Again, we will be faced at some point with a terrifying choice of living with a random, unforeseeable threat or using actual force.

So you’re waiting for the big one, right? What on earth am I going to say about Brexit itself? There is an obvious temptation, if only out of sheer journalistic mischief, to add it to my list of Things That Will Not Happen in 2019, especially as I have written recently on this page that I am beginning to suspect that to be the case. But no, I can’t do it. My belief in the resolve of the British people and the integrity of the institutions that are still, in spite of everything, the expression of their political identity, is too great.

We will leave the EU on the appointed date with one form of words or another and this country will carry on with its usual courage, humour and decency into 2019 and beyond. I do hope that is what you wanted to hear.

The West will fail to find a way of containing threats from China and Russia and we will be faced with some tough choices