In many ways, it’s been the year of the comeback.
A record landslide brought Labour back to power in Britain, for the first time in 14 years (and five prime ministers).
Donald Trump’s triumphant return in the US is almost complete, surviving assassination attempts, election defeats and a historic criminal conviction.
And 30 years after they first emerged, Noel and Liam Gallagher reconciled once more, selling 1.4 million Oasis tickets to fans in 158 countries for a world tour to look forward to in 2025.
Let’s go back through some of the most memorable, important, and unmissable stories from the last year.
January
In 2023, Barbenheimer was one of the most memorable film battles in Hollywood history.
This year started by crowning a winner. Oppenheimer was named Best Picture at the Oscars in January.
Barbie still came out on top in terms of ticket sales, but our analysis showed that Oppenheimer’s win ended what would have been a 20-year sequence of the Best Picture winner not even being in the top 10 highest grossing films of that year, going back to the final Lord of the Rings film in 2004.
The move to reward smaller films at the Oscars is very much a 21st-century phenomenon. Prior to 2004, the Best Picture winner had been in the top 10 every year going back to at least 1977.
February
In February our reporting highlighted the tragic stories of people being sexually assaulted while in NHS mental health care.
Nearly 20,000 “sexual safety incidents” were reported on inpatient mental health wards between 2019 and 2023, with the annual figure rising each year.
Listen to our award-winning four-part podcast, Patient 11, produced in conjunction with The Independent, going through some of the harrowing individual experiences and what can be done to help people affected.
March
We’ve already mentioned the massive Oasis tour scheduled for 2025, but 2024 was Taylor’s version. Her mammoth Eras tour reached the UK, leading us to ask the question as to whether she was bigger than the Beatles.
In other music news, Raye recorded an almost clean sweep of the main prizes at the Brits in March.
We analysed some of the numbers behind the music that had been nominated over the 40-year history of the awards, and found that songs from recent years were more “emotionally negative” than previous decades, but also more danceable and contained more speech.
The rock and indie dominance of the 90s and early 00s is over, replaced by more electronic music and a recent surge of rap/grime/drill records.
Read more of our music-related data journalism:
How pop music has changed over the Brit years
Inside the UK’s music festivals crisis
April
Nine months after Hamas’s attack on Israel, and Israel’s retaliation in Gaza, the stakes seemed to be rising for other countries in the region.
On 1 April, Israel bombed the Iranian embassy in Syria, killing 16 people. Iran responded by launching a drone and missile attack in Israel. They were largely intercepted by Israeli allies, including the British army, but some strikes did make an impact – 33 civilians were injured.
We took a look at the military capability of both countries – what weapons, planes and defence systems may be used in the conflict and how much damage they would be liable to inflict on people.
Read more:
What missiles could Israel use in an attack – and can Iran defend itself?
May
In May we revisited a conflict that has received less global media attention, but one which has displaced a population larger than the entire of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland put together.
Around 11.2 million people in Sudan have been forced to leave their homes since 2023, according to the UN, equivalent to one in every five people in the country.
The conflict between the official army of Sudan and a paramilitary group called the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) began following disagreements about how to integrate the RSF into the army, as part of a transition to civilian rule following the deposition of longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir in 2019.
We revealed, alongside the Centre for Information Resilience, that more than 200 separate settlements had been attacked with fire during the war. The tactic, mostly employed by the RSF, was likened to “ethnic cleansing” and increases the very present risk of famine in the country.
Read our Sudan coverage:
More than 100 settlements set on fire with over quarter targeted more than once
200 settlements hit by fires since start of conflict as scorched earth tactics intensify
June
Closer to home, Rishi Sunak (remember him?) surprised political commentators and his own party alike by calling a general election for early July, meaning campaigning was in full force throughout June.
We tracked where the party leaders were visiting to identify the key battleground constituencies that they were prioritising.
Mr Sunak often cut a lonely figure on his campaign trail, which was mired by gaffes (notably the furious criticism he received for abandoning D-Day commemorations in Normandy prematurely).
His constituency visits focused mostly on northern constituencies in an attempt to fend off Labour and Reform, as well as rearguard action against the Lib Dems in the south. He visited constituencies with vote margins of all sizes, no matter how small, a sign of his party’s vulnerability across the map.
Meanwhile, Lib Dem and Labour leaders Sir Ed Davey and Sir Keir Starmer grew increasingly bold throughout their campaigning as their confidence grew of being unable to unseat the Conservatives in even the safest Tory shires, reflecting July’s eventual result.
Read more of our general election campaign coverage:
Election campaign trails: How party leaders upped the ante
General election campaign midpoint: Lonely Sunak fought battle on three fronts
Tracking the election campaigns: The seats where polling results have got worse despite leader visits
What the data says about some of the key issues in the general election campaign
July
Labour recorded a historic election landslide on 4 July, but if you’re spending part of the Christmas holiday season reading Sky News’s “2024 in numbers”, you probably already knew that.
While Labour beat the Conservatives almost everywhere, and smashed the SNP in Scotland, our analysis revealed that they lost votes – largely to the Green Party – in many of the biggest cities in England and Wales, particularly those with significant Muslim populations.
Read our full results analysis here:
Labour’s landslide election in maps and charts
Historic firsts from the 2024 general election in numbers and charts
August
The attention of the world was focused on Paris in early August as the Olympics came to town, bringing breakdancers along for the first time.
We looked at some of the records achieved in the more mainstream sports to see which have been in place longest, which are stagnating, and assessed whether we are reaching peak sporting performance.
Javier Sotomayor’s men’s high jump record was set in 1991
Host nation France received the fourth most medals, their highest tally since the second modern Games in 1900 (when they were also hosting). That success inspired us to look at what kind of medal boost host nations get at the Olympics, and who’s been best at sustaining that success in future Games.
Read our Olympics coverage here:
Fewer world records were broken in Paris than at other recent Olympics
How much of an Olympics medal boost do the host nations get?
September
One of Labour’s most significant election promises was a pledge to add 1.5 million new homes to England over five years. In September they started to tell us how they were going to try and do it.
Our analysis revealed the major hurdles the government faces to achieve this goal, including public funding requirements, planning capacity, “arbitrary” local building targets, and construction workforce shortages, to name a few.
We will have to wait for the spring budget to find out how much Labour is planning to invest in housing. The last time a UK government achieved anything like the scale of housebuilding being proposed, it was backed by public funding of nearly sixfold the level it is at today.
Read our housing stories here:
Raise funding for social homes or fail to meet building targets, housing sector warns government
Shared ownership: ‘We can’t afford it. It makes a mockery of being in social housing’
October
October marked a historic moment with the first-ever budget announcement by a female chancellor and the first Labour budget in 15 years.
The budget’s headline measures included a rise in employer national insurance contributions and an increase in the minimum wage, leaving businesses to shoulder much of the impact. But Sky News analysis also revealed another side to the story: people on low incomes had already been feeling the squeeze for years.
In exclusive research, the Sky News data team found that the tax rate for low-income workers reached its highest point in a decade. Workers in the bottom 25% of earners have faced what amounts to a 60% tax hike over the past three years.
Read our budget coverage here:
How the budget could make things worse for millions of working people with extreme money troubles
Who gains and who loses from the budget – and the impact on individuals
November
Eight years after his famous win over Hillary Clinton and four years after his loss to Joe Biden, Donald Trump was back with a historic election victory. It’s almost like he never went away.
He became the first person in more than 125 years to win a non-consecutive second term as US president and he gained votes in almost every county. It was only the second Republican popular vote victory since 1988, and he managed to get young people and Latinos to vote for him in numbers far higher than his previous two runs.
His victory, however, may not be as “unprecedented and powerful” as he’d like to believe. Our analysis revealed that he would have lost had fewer than 0.1% of the right voters changed their votes to Kamala Harris.
American elections do tend to be tight, so that’s actually a higher threshold than Mr Biden’s, George W Bush’s two, and indeed his own 2016 win. But it’s significantly less safe than either of Barack Obama’s wins in 2008 and 2012.
November was also a landmark month in British politics, as MPs voted to support the assisted dying bill put forward by Kim Leadbeater at its second reading, by a majority of 55.
There are several more stages and votes to pass before the bill could become law, but getting through to committee reading is a significant moment.
Read our US election coverage here:
US election: How big a win was this for Donald Trump?
US election: The big numbers behind Donald Trump’s attempt to shape his legacy
US election results: Donald Trump’s victory in maps and charts
Trump v Harris: Perception, reality and how their records in office compare
December
We dove into the world of music again in December, this time analysing every UK Christmas No 1 since the very first one. Earlier in the year, we tackled hits at the Brits, but the festive season called for a deep dive into the songs that defined our Christmases.
What makes a Christmas No 1 today? The secret seems to lie in danceable, high-energy tracks – just ask LadBaby, who’ve claimed the top spot more times than anyone else.
But it wasn’t always this way. In the decades before this one, the charts took a more emotional turn, with some of the saddest songs dominating the festive period, thanks to a string of X factor winners getting the No 1 spot.
Apart from the current era, songs often followed the economic mood of the nation.
Read our Christmas coverage here:
The recipe for a Christmas number one – and how the secret to success has changed
The cost of a Christmas dinner
The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.
