The most memorable newspaper front pages of 2022

Many papers carried a quote from West Yorkshire’s deputy chief fire officer Dave Walton, who called it a “wake-up call” for the impact of climate change on heatwaves.

The Bin Laden donation

In a scoop for The Sunday Times, Gabriel Pogrund and Charles Keidan revealed that the then Prince Charles accepted a £1m payment from Osama bin Laden’s family. Clarence House said the Prince of Wales’s Charitable Fund (PWCF) received the donation after “thorough due diligence” and the decision was taken by the trustees.

“No rule has been broken, no law has been broken,” said BBC royal correspondent Jonny Dymond. But “did Prince Charles or his inner circle really think it was a good idea to take money from the Bin Ladens?” Once it became public, “however many checks were made and rules were followed – it was always going to look horrible”.

The Uber files

The Guardian published its global investigation into 124,000 leaked documents from Uber over the summer. The mammoth exposé, in which 180 journalists across 40 media organisations trawled through data spanning 40 countries from 2013 to 2017, claimed the tech company had “flouted the law, duped police, exploited violence against drivers and secretly lobbied governments across the world”.

Uber said it would not “make excuses for past behaviour that is clearly not in line with our present values”, but asked the public to judge it on what it had done in the years after 2017 and “what we will do in the years to come”.

Death of the Queen

As the nation woke up to its first day following the Queen’s death, newspapers in Britain and across the world “published historic editions to commemorate her 70-year reign”, said The Spectator. 

“How to find the words? Our grief is a hundred emotions, all of them hard to grasp,” wrote columnist Sarah Vine on the front page of the Daily Mail.

‘Lettuce rejoice’

The Economist’s unfavourable comparison of Liz Truss’s shelf-life to that of a lettuce inspired the Daily Star to launch a livestream of an iceberg lettuce next to a framed photograph of the prime minister – to see which would last the longest.

The stunt hit headlines across the globe, with The Washington Post explaining to baffled US readers that the PM had become the “butt of quintessentially British jokes”. In the end, Truss’s Downing Street stint expired faster than the well-watched veg and the Daily Star celebrated with a front page declaring the lettuce “victorious”.

A lost decade

The cost-of-living crisis was high on the news agenda as inflation soared and disposable incomes fell. The i splashed with “UK’s lost decade” following Jeremy Hunt’s Autumn Statement in November. 

The chancellor admitted he would have to take “difficult decisions” on areas such as tax and public spending to ensure stability and growth. The paper said the country had seen the “biggest drop in living standards on record… sending British earnings back to 2013”. Britain is paying the price for “Putin’s war in Ukraine, the pandemic, Brexit policies and Liz Truss’s damage to market confidence”, it said.

Article source: https://www.theweek.co.uk/news/media/958860/memorable-front-pages-of-2022