In Pictures: Boris Johnson ends 2021 on back foot after year of ups and downs

Boris Johnson at the UK Mission to the United Nations in New York (Stefan Rousseau/PA)

Boris Johnson began the year with hopes that the vaccines that had come online in December would soon cast coronavirus if not into oblivion then at least into a place where normal life could resume for most Britons.

Little would he have imagined that a year on it would be his own staff’s behaviour in the build-up to last Christmas that would be dominating headlines, with the emergence of the Omicron variant raising the spectre of more emergency provisions and the deja vu decision of whether to lock down for a second festive period.