The importance of things that didn't happen in 2015

Many predictions related to politics, terrorism and fashion went badly awry. And what transpired instead was often more interesting

There is cherry blossom on the tree outside the kitchen window already, candyfloss pink on a dark winter afternoon. Spring is springing everywhere this mild December, the garden all confusion; roses back in bloom, spring bulbs pushing up through the autumn seedheads. Winter simply hasn't happened this year. And while weather obviously isn't to be confused with climate... well, if it's not global warming, then it certainly feels like an omen of something.

But then 2015 has been that kind of year, one defined as much by what didn't happen as by what did; all those empty spaces where we thought something was going to be, creating room for the completely unexpected, for cherry blossom at Christmas. 

It's hard to know what to call these "unhappenings" - non-events makes them sound insignificant, and they're not - but this has been a year for heeding the dogs not barking in the night time and the frosts that never came.

Remember back in August, when many otherwise level-headed people were convinced that a meltdown in the Chinese stock market was going to trigger the mother of all crashes; the long-predicted great apocalypse, worse than 2008, since central banks had already used up all the get-out-of-jail-free cards? Damian McBride, Gordon Brown's ex-spin doctor and a man I have never previously seen panic in public, even tweeted apocalyptic advice about what to do if it happened (assume law and order would break down along with the banking system, stockpile bottled water and cash, generally make like a disaster movie).

And who knows, he may yet turn out to be right, if a bit premature. Ed Balls, to whom MaBride remains close and who also leans towards the "apocalypse soon" theory, didn't get the idea from nowhere; you hear something similar all over the City, a jittery feeling that things look too good to be true, that the economic indicators might somewhat be out of kilter with reality, rather as the polls were in May.

But in the autumn of 2015, at least, the crash didn't happen. And its unhappening dictated much of the autumn that followed; steady employment, the Fed raising rates in the US, an otherwise implausible-sounding growth forecast that allowed George Osborne to find several squillion down the back of the sofa and miraculously make the tax credit cuts go away, and thus the chancellor becoming more and more convinced he has a shot at the Tory leadership in 2019.

The economy's failure to collapse wasn't the only benign unhappening either. Arguably the most important thing that hasn't happened to us this year is that we have not becomes Paris.

There can't be a single sentient being at the top of British politics, policing or the security services who hasn't spent most of the past 14 years aware that tomorrow it could be us; that terrorists only have to get lucky once, and the odds are in their favor. They haven't this year, and so we have not had a Bataclan massacre, and people are alive who wouldn't otherwise have been. As a nation we have been given the priceless gift of time to reflect soberly on how it could have been (and may still be) us, and to work out how far it's reasonable to go in order to stop it.

But not all the year's unhappenings, the dogs that didn't bark and the frosts that didn't come, were matters of life and death. Some were just people taking grat delight in refusing to behave as experts predicted, and thus upsetting the expected order of events; tiny, thrilling acts of bolshiness affording glimpses into the national psyche.

If the X Factor winner Lousia Johnson can't take the Christmas number one slot in the charts this year, for example, then Simon Cowell will start to look interestingly mortal and the power of factory-made pop much reduced.

And something similar is happening in fashion. For all the pronouncements that this was the year of the flare, the point at which British women would finally hang up their skinny jeans, a quick walk down any high street shows they did no such thing. Women like skinny jeans; they're not giving up perfectly serviceable pairs of trousers for wide-legged pairs whose hems drag in puddles, just for the sake of filling fashion industry pockets. Could it be that we're not quite as in thrall to their bossy diktats about how women ought to loos as we thought?

And it's this kind of rebellious unhappening that has dominated politics. Ed Miliband not winning the election was the first significant unhappening, leading to the non-holding of a Tory leadership contest that a year ago senior Conservatives were taking for granted, following David Cameron's declaration that he wouldn't contest another election. Thus the Tory leadership sprint everyone once predicted this summer - Theresa May v Boris Johnson v at a stretch possibly George Osborn - was cancelled and a quite different marathon begun. Theresa May has seen Nicky Morgan (whose non-losing of eminently losable Loughborough was a little-noticed side effect of Labor's non-winning of the election) creep up on the inside; Johnson must be wondering why the rush to get back into parliament; and Osborne has five years to strengthen his grip.

But the biggest surprises have been inside Labor, where none of the experienced candidates for leader caught the imagination and in the vacuum - the intellectual non-event - of the campaign grew cherry blossom at Christmas.

Jeremy Corbyn is the logical product of great pent-up frustration, of people not wanting to be told how to vote and think any more than they want to be told what to wear. He's not Donald Trump, but he is perhaps the beneficiary of something similar; a revolt against ordained wisdom, in that everybody says it's obvious Trump cannot be the Republican nominee but increasingly you wonder what it takes to stop him. The non-implosion of the Trump campaign is arguably the biggest unhappening of the year, the sort that will leave a mark even when (and if) he eventually implodes. 

For the likelihood is that ordained wisdom reasserts itself eventually: implausible candidates lose to plausible ones, bust follows boom, and the frost will eventually come and kill the cherry blossom. But the garden this spring will be different in tiny ways, because of the winter that never was. Even things that didn't happen cannot easily be undone.