2022: year in review

Historians talk about the ‘year of the three emperors’; religious commentators talk about the ‘year of the three popes’. We can now go one better and refer to 2022 as the ‘year of the four chancellors’.

The upheaval we have experienced this year is unprecedented. Any semblance of normal routine in the annual fiscal cycle has gone completely out of the window. There have been endless announcements and yet astonishingly of the last five chancellors – Sajid Javid Rishi Sunak Nadhim Zahawi Kwasi Kwarteng Jeremy Hunt – only one has actually delivered a formal budget statement. To be honest it has sometimes been a struggle for the magazine to keep up with all of these twists and turns. The number of articles which have had to be rewritten or completely junked at short notice is not worth thinking about and trying...