Bleary-eyed and dry of mouth, stumbling into 2020 we fired up our phones for messages from loved ones and absent friends, and instead there was one from our new Prime Minister. “This is going to be a fantastic year for Britain,” it said.

And it certainly has been, in the “you couldn’t make it up” way (although, of course, Boris Johnson is pretty adept at just that). Fantastic exaggerations, misstatements, dole and lorry queues, deaths, health claims, lockdowns, tiers and tears, reckless optimism, stop-start Brexit negotiations, vaccine promises, eye-test excuses, chummery and flummery and just about the worst year most of us can remember.

What we can definitely be sure of is that the PM won’t be tweeting, as we wake into a new year, about how wonderful 2021 is going to be. If we get through it without starvation, pestilence and mass rioting it will be an achievement.

This isn’t a chronology or diary of our Plague Year, but it is just worth remembering how Bojo’s bluster over Covid came unstuck. The pandemic was declared on January 9 and as it spread at alarming rapidity throughout the world he was still sanguine about it.

As March began he was bragging about how he was still shaking hands with people and coronavirus patients – although his own Covid comeuppance was shortly to come – refusing to close sporting events like Cheltenham races, resisting a first lockdown, boasting that he would “send coronavirus packing”.

Then there were his claims that a new antibody test was a gamechanger, that a world-beating “moonshot” testing plan would get us “closer to normality” and that November’s four-week lockdown would “save Christmas”. Before it was cancelled.

Johnson has performed so many political pirouettes is it little wonder that he stumbles on directionlessly? He was elected a year ago to “Get Brexit Done” and with assurances that we would certainly reach a tariff-free deal with the EU. There have been so many false starts on it that in the sporting world he would have been disqualified long before now. There’s less than a week to go and I don’t know about you but I’m getting in early to strip Tesco of toilet paper.

Dominic Cummings, the Prime Minster’s most influential adviser, was one of the faces of 2020 and Johnson had his back when he went on a 260-mile car journey to Barnard Castle in lockdown to test if his eyesight was up to driving subsequently. “In every respect, he has acted responsibly, legally and with integrity,” Boris said.

In November, Dom resigned, days after saying rumours that he would resign were invented. It followed some kind of verbal punch-up in Downing Street but suggestions that there was physical violence were quickly and rightly rejected. Come on, Carrie could take Dom!

There was a fractious dispute in Buckingham Palace too, ending in Harry and Meghan consciously uncoupling from the royal family, although they put it that they were stepping down as senior royals. They skipped across the pond to California to market themselves and sign a $100 million TV deal with Netflix. A specially-created superhero franchise role for Harry is being mooted, although he has a clause saying he won’t dress up in Nazi uniform again, whatever the price.

The couple spent a quiet Christmas at home, toasting marshmallows and themselves, opening presents, although it isn’t known if there were any from the UK taxpayer-funded close protection officers.

His Uncle Andy is in the soap over his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and whether he had underage sex with a then-17 year old Virginia Roberts. She has described where and when but he says he was munching pizza in Woking at the time, not when he was in flagrante, obviously, because he says he can’t remember even meeting the woman. And he doesn’t take pineapple on it. It wasn’t a kiss-and-tell by her, but a hopeful kiss-and-spell. Inside.

Andy’s friend, and allegedly Epstein’s madam, is Ghislaine Maxwell, presently residing at the people’s pleasure in prison in New York. Her father was the publisher and crook Robert Maxwell whom I knew well, if only to despise. He nicked my pension and thousands of others and I have had the pleasure of tap-dancing on his grave on the Mount of Olives.

He was also the richest council-house tenant in the UK. Ghislaine was brought up there, in Headington Hall, owned by the local council. With others I once took tea with him there and can report that his cup was twice the size of everyone else’s, although I don’t recall meeting her. Fortunately.

The revenge of the #MeToo movement claimed the most notorious and high-ranking victim, Harvey Weinstein, who was jailed in February for rape and sexual assault. He also caught coronavirus, like Boris, as well as a lot of famous people you probably forgot about – like Tom Hanks, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (no relation), Prince Charles, Brian Cox, Robert Pattinson and Kanye West.

Kanye even ran for President, or at least he said he would, and was endorsed by Chance the Rapper and Elon Musk. His wife Kim Kardashian said he was having mental problems. But when has that ever debarred a presidential candidate? Mind you, her husband did give her a unique 40th birthday present – a life-size hologram of her dead father which sings and dances and tells jokes and reassures her that she married “the most, most, most, most, most genius man in the whole world”.

If the plague year couldn’t have got even stranger, then recall in May during the pandemic when the Bolivian pan flute orchestra was stranded in a haunted German castle surrounded by wolves for 73 days. I don’t know if they got home or if the wolves got them.

On the day that President Trump urged citizens to drink bleach to defeat the virus, the Pentagon released footage of UFOs, although it called them “unidentified aerial phenomena”, which I hope booted the tourist traffic to Bonnybridge which, as ufologists know, is a galactic interchange and alien fuelling stop.

As if we didn’t have enough to plough through, Barack Obama penned a 768-page memoir of mind-numbing banality. Of his failure in college to pull, he describes his chat-up lines as trying to woo intellectually. For the “long-legged socialist” who lived in his dorm it was Marx and Marcuse, Fanon for the “smooth-skinned sociology major” and Foucault for “the ethereal bisexual who wore mostly black”. And these are the raunchy bits.

We had the pantomime of the present president losing he election in November. “Oh no he didn’t,” screamed the Republicans and their lawsuits. “Oh yes he did,” the courts replied. Joe Biden will become the 45th US President next month with Donald Trump still not conceding he has lost. He’ll probably chain himself to the Oval Office desk and it will take stun guns and wire cutters to remove him.

Trump has scraped the barrel so often it has deep gouges, but probably the nadir was when he said Black Lives Matter – formed in the wake of his police shooting down unarmed men like George Floyd – had as its goal “to achieve the destruction of the nuclear family, abolish the police, abolish prisons, abolish border security, abolish capitalism and abolish school choice” – none of which is true.

There was always Rudy Giuliani on hand to provide the bizarre counterpoint, exemplified by the press conference in the car park of Four Seasons Total Landscaping in Philadelphia – accidentally booked instead of the grounds of the luxury hotel. And the one where his hair dye melted and ran down his face in the heat of TV lights. But it reached its apogee when he was caught in a compromising position, his hands down his trousers on a bed, with Borat’s fictional underage daughter. He was tucking in his shirt, he said.

Surely next year can’t live down to 2020? I’ve checked my Nostradamus and it’s not looking great. A Russian scientist will invent a virus that can turn people into zombies (as if Covid wasn’t bad enough) and there will be a famine of biblical proportions. Oh, and there will be war between two allies – “Two brothers torn apart by Chaos” – which could well be us and the EU. Not great at all.