Euan FergusonSunday December 23, 2001The ObserverMay An anti-globalisation demonstration, its supporters buoyed by increasing international unity and the success of Naomi Klein's watershed book No Logo, was thwarted by London police with the effective, if cynical, ploy of cooping them up for hours in Oxford Circus without letting them go to the toilet.
Tony Blair came out and admitted wearing specs. Princess Margaret was, it emerged, almost blind. Ronnie Biggs announced via the Sun that he wanted to come back to Britain. The Sun called the story 'one of the biggest news coups in the history of newspapers'.
We learnt, to great surprise, that there were racists in the Tory Party - John Townend was forced eventually by a fizzing William Hague to apologise for his comments about our 'mongrel race' - and that Martin McGuinness had, before his peacemaking years with Sinn Fein, actually been in the IRA.
Tony Blair launched Labour's election campaign before an audience of apparently swooning schoolgirls in Southwark, south London. Even his friends used the word 'cheesy'; Matthew Parris in the Times called it 'breathtakingly, toe-curlingly, hog-whimperingly tasteless'. Meanwhile, as the Conservatives unveiled adverts which seemed to blame Labour voters for rapes committed by released prisoners, and announced plans to lock up all asylum-seekers (ridiculed by Labour, of course, until they announced the same thing some months later), Hague's father said a Tory win would be a 'miracle'. It looked even more distant after John Prescott smacked countryside protester Craig Evans in Rhyl; never had the Deputy Prime Minister been more popular.
Ariel Sharon apologised, eventually, for the Israeli army's shelling of a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, which had killed a four-month-old girl. The Pope - a wax model of whose prostrate form being hit by a meteorite was being sold to an art collector for £620,000 - apologised, eventually, for the Catholic sack of Constantinople in 1204.
For the first time since 1967, Israel launched jets against Palestine. Slowly, a number of Arab countries began to break off diplomatic relations.
June A survey found that 12 per cent of Scots had never washed their bedlinen.
As the number of slaughtered livestock passed three million, Britain voted. Just. Labour won another landslide - 413 seats to the Tories' 166 - but the turnout was the lowest since 1918. Only three in five voted, and only one in four people voted Labour. Blair congratulated himself by taking a pay rise, from £116,000 to £163,000, consigning Robin Cook to effective oblivion as Leader of the House, and writing a Queen's Speech which promised greater private involvement in public services.
Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh was executed, after lengthy delays because of mistakes by the FBI: his last meal comprised two pints of mint-chocolate-chip ice cream. A Hamas suicide bomber killed 20 people at a Tel Aviv nightclub. Macedonia began slowly to blow, with thousands of Albanians fleeing to Kosovo. A million ducks were flown to northern China to eat a swarm of locusts.
Lord Cullen's report on the Paddington rail crash blamed Railtrack for 'lamentable failure' and 'institutional paralysis'.
James Bulger's killers were released , to vows of revenge from Liverpool if ever their identities are discovered. Four boys were charged with the murder of Damilola Taylor. A Houston mother drowned her five children in the bath.
Oh, I forgot. Hague resigned.
In New York, a court convicted four men linked to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda organisation of the 1998 explosions at US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya which killed 224.
July As Gerry Adams confessed he found solace in hugging large trees, David Trimble resigned in anger at the IRA's refusal to decommission; just as the province geared up for another happy marching season.
Barry George, 41, described in irony-free tones by most newspapers as 'an obsessive with an unhealthy interest in celebrities', was found guilty of the murder of Jill Dando, even though the bulk of the evidence was heavily circumstantial; even the Mail had doubts. Liverpool Airport was renamed John Lennon Airport, and a £3m fountain was announced for Hyde Park to commemorate Diana. Slobodan Milosevic, in whose name a number of fine fountains and airports had been bombed, was lifted from Belgrade and flown suddenly to The Hague for trial, but refused to recognise the court's authority.
There were 10 hours of riots in Bradford, after tensions erupted following an Anti-Nazi League demonstration. More than 100 people were injured and the Asian and white communities were pronounced 'dangerously fragmented'.
Goran Ivanisevic, only in the competition on a wild card, beat Pat Rafter in the most thrilling Wimbledon men's final of recent years. He made Croatia's day, and ruined that of Australia, who were in the process that weekend of beating England in the first Ashes Test and hammering the Lions in Melbourne. 'The one thing you have to say about modern England cricket teams,' said the Melbourne Age, 'is that they know how to lose.'
Augusto Pinochet was deemed mentally unfit to stand trial in Chile. George W. Bush revoked the nuclear test ban treaty and announced that trials would begin again in the Nevada desert. A UN report showed Norway was the best country in the world to live. Pearl Harbor flopped in the US and UK, but took fortunes in Japan. A boy of eight had his arm bitten off by a shark in Florida. It was later sewn back on, having been pulled from the shark's mouth by his uncle (the boy's uncle, not the shark's).
Jeffrey Archer was jailed for four years after seven fraught weeks of trial for perjury. He was taken to Belmarsh, after being allowed a few hours' freedom to attend his mother's funeral. Paramount Pictures, about to make a 'prequel' to Star Trek, was advised by British colleagues to drop plans to call Kirk's predecessor Captain Jeffrey Archer.
Israeli tanks moved into the West Bank. Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi ordered 200 body bags for the forthcoming G8 meeting in Genoa, anticipating anti-globalisation riots. In the end, one man was killed and more than 300 injured. Back here, police shot dead a man brandishing a novelty lighter in the shape of a gun. Four days earlier, Merseyside police had done the same to a man brandishing a Samurai sword.
On British TV, Chris Morris's Brass Eye spoofed anti-paedophile hysteria and our confusion over children and sex, and was instantly condemned hysterically by David Blunkett, Tessa Jowell (who it turned out hadn't seen it) and various point-missing newspapers. The Star ran a diatribe against his 'sick' humour opposite a picture caption celebrating the size of 15-year-old Charlotte Church's chest.
August Police injured in the Bradford riots said they were going to sue their own force for damages. Louis Farrakhan, head of the Nation of Islam, won the right, denied him since 1986, to enter Britain. The first gondola was rowed across the Channel, in six hours and 20 minutes. Coming the other way, two asylum- seekers tried to cross on a lilo; they were picked up seven miles from Calais. In Sighthill, Glasgow, where the population of 4,500 contains 1,500 asylum-seekers, a Kurdish refugee was stabbed to death.
Israeli rocket attacks killed two boys, aged eight and 10, in Nablus, while a Palestinian suicide bomber killed 18 in a pizza restaurant in Jerusalem. Doubts grew that Sharon's policy of 'targeted' attacks on leading Palestinian terrorists was winning the swift peace he had promised. Here, just as the Provisional IRA was beginning to make conciliatory noises about decommissioning, the Real IRA exploded a car-bomb in Ealing, injuring seven.
Charles fell off his horse again and went to hospital. The Queen Mother celebrated her 101st birthday, after receiving a full blood transfusion. Princess Margaret appeared paralysed down one side and almost wholly blind.
The Taliban arrested eight foreigners working for Shelter Now International and accused them of trying to convert Muslims. George W. Bush took another month off on holiday, lifting to 40 per cent the amount of time he had taken off since his inauguration, and Bill Clinton took a $312m advance for his memoirs. Ian Woosnam took a new caddy, sacking Myles Byrne for a) oversleeping, and b) probably costing him the Open by packing too many clubs into his bag in breach of the rules.
Five days after its 'historic' offer to decommission, the IRA had a rethink and decided no, let's not. Three of its members were then arrested in Colombia, having allegedly gone there to learn how to make better bombs.
Sophie and Edward, apparently perturbed by criticism that they weren't doing enough public duties to merit their official £141,000, went 'on strike' .
A peace treaty was signed in Macedonia, and British troops prepared to go in and police the handover of 3,000 weapons from Albanian guerrillas. The week they arrived, a sapper was killed by a lump of concrete thrown through his car window.
David Beckham shaved off half of his left eyebrow; Al Gore emerged with a rugged beard. The season grew sillier. Paul Burrell, Diana's former butler, was charged with the theft of 342 items from her household, including a Leo Sayer record worth an estimated £5m. Sorry, there should be a comma after the word 'record' there. Match of the Day disappeared from the BBC, replaced by ITV's The Premiership, which generations of fans swiftly forsook for the pub, claiming it was on too early and didn't show enough football.
A helicopter crashed near Paddington after picking up a man injured by a train after walking on the line after he'd crashed his car on a railway bridge. A pensioner died on a hospital trolley in Essex after a nine-hour wait. Abu Ali Mustafa, leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was killed by rockets from an Israeli helicopter.
On 19 August, an instructor at Palm Beach County Airport in Lantana heard Mohamed Atta speaking in Arabic over the plane's radio. The instructor, who speaks Arabic himself, thought Atta only intended to turn on the intercom to talk to his passenger. Instead, Atta keyed the plane's radio and exclaimed, happily: 'God is Great!'
