From the rise of Shilpa Shetty to the fall of the Brown bounce, it was to be a tumultuous 12 months. Scottish politics may have witnessed momentous change, but it was the story of one missing girl that commanded the news agenda.
By Torcuil Crichton

IT was a year dominated by just one name - Madeleine McCann. Across acres of newsprint, through hours of television airtime and on photocopied posters at all the United Kingdom's exit and entry points, the picture of the missing three-year-old was everywhere, and no-one was untouched by her disappearance.

Her parents, Gerry and Kate McCann, were sanctified and demonised in turn as the media spun a story across eight months based on virtually no solid information at all. Every angle, from paedophilia and infanticide through to slavery, were rehearsed in this horror version of Little Red Riding Hood. Yet we were gripped, because every parent could empathise with the McCanns and we clung onto every scrap of gossip and rumour in the hope that there would be a resolution.

It was a year of momentous political change - Scotland elected its first Nationalist government, and Alex Salmond predicted that independence would be achieved by 2017. Tony Blair stepped down as Labour's most successful and most controversial prime minister and the yo-yo effect of opinion polls bounced his successor Gordon Brown into the doldrums and up popped David Cameron as the man most likely to.

We were told to worry less about Iraq and more about Afghanistan, as the death toll of British troops involved in intensive fighting in the southern province of Helmand rose. Iran proved to be a sure-footed and persistent irritant to the West, and George Bush, beset by domestic problems, began to look like a faded warrior whose time had passed.

The biggest worry was the environment. The ice caps melted at an unprecedented rate, polar bears replaced whales as symbols of a threatened environment and it rained as if Noah were alive and well and living in Cambridgeshire or Hull.

It was one hell of a year.

JANUARY Presaging a crisis in television that spanned the year, 2007 began with the racist bullying of Indian Bollywood actor Shilpa Shetty by fellow guests on Celebrity Big Brother.

Shetty went on to win the show, giving her an international profile, lucrative contracts and a meeting with Tony Blair. Jade Goody, her tormenter, emerged from the BB house to find the true meaning of reality television - her successful perfume, biography and her TV contracts were axed.

Whether it was media hysteria, a class-based catfight or plain ignorance, the programme sparked a huge race row and a little soul-searching, resulting in Channel 4 receiving a record 45,000 complaints and being forced to make a public apology.

For broadcasters, it was the beginning of a year of apologies, from profiteering on phone-in competitions to the misleading footage that gave the false impression that the Queen had stormed out of a photoshoot. Once the trusted source of news and entertainment in the corner of the room, television crossed a rubicon which left it looking vulnerable to new media.

By the end of the year, the Queen was broadcasting herself on YouTube and could probably have watched it all on an iPhone. In January, Apple introduced to the US market what chief executive Steve Jobs described as a revolutionary mobile phone.

Savage storms with winds close to 100mph tore across Britain, killing 13 people, and scavengers descended on Branscombe Beach in Devon to plunder consumer goods - from nappies to BMW motorbikes - washed ashore from the shipwrecked MSC Napoli.

President George W Bush, entering his last full year in office, proposed to send 20,000 more troops to Iraq as part of a "surge" strategy to counter the growing death toll. It seemed to work, and although Iraqi civilians were still being killed, the number of attacks on US troops in Baghdad did decrease in the months that followed.

Also in the US, footballer David Beckham signed a $1 million-a-week deal with Los Angeles Galaxy. At home, Magnus Magnusson, television's Mastermind interrogator and Icelandic culture-bearer, died aged 77.

FEBRUARY In February, Britain was hit by its first major outbreak of bird flu. A disease which had moved slowly across Europe after spreading from the Far East was now on our doorstep. At Bernard Matthews's processing plant in Suffolk, almost 160,000 turkey chicks had to be slaughtered; £70m was wiped from the company's profits. Initially, wild birds were blamed, but the outbreak was eventually traced back to one of Matthews's farms in Hungary.

An official report into the outbreak found waste meat trimmings had been left in open bins outside the plant, where flocks of gulls were seen picking through the scraps. Yet Bernard Matthews received almost £600,000 in compensation for the compulsory slaughter of its birds - and the company was never prosecuted, as the Food Standards Agency concluded that there was insufficient evidence.

In a turnaround for one member of the "axis of evil", North Korea agreed to dismantle nuclear facilities and allow international inspections in exchange for oil and aid, exactly what the communist state had been demanding in the first place.

One woman died and 89 people were injured when a Virgin Pendolino train bound for Glasgow derailed in Cumbria. Always one to spin a story, Richard Branson praised the train driver as a hero for staying at the controls when in fact following a derailment there was nothing the man could practically do.

Tony Blair told a packed House of Commons that it was time for British troops to come home from Iraq, although thousands of British soldiers would stay into 2008. Four years after the invasion, life had become dangerous and difficult for British troops in the southern city of Basra. Where once they had walked from street to street, they were now being pounded with mortar fire and were reviled by all sides in a country on the brink of civil war.

Withdrawal from Iraq simply equated to reinforcement in Afghanistan, where an intense campaign was being fought against the Taliban in Helmand Province.

The Queen won an Oscar for Helen Mirren and Forest Whitaker won the best actor award for his portrayal of Ugandan president Idi Amin in The Last King Of Scotland. Martin Scorsese's The Departed won the Oscar for the best film and Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, underlining the catastrophic effects of climate change, was given the Oscar for the best documentary. Global warming remained high on the agenda for the rest of the year and Gore, the former US vice-president, went on to share the Nobel Peace Prize with the UN climate panel.

MARCH The number of British troops killed in Afghanistan reached 50 when Ross Clark, 25, and Liam McLaughlin, 21, were killed in Sangin, a Taliban stronghold that would be liberated by British troops some weeks later. By mid-December another 36 British troops would be dead. Attempts to persuade other Nato states to send more soldiers to Helmand faltered and the number of British troops engaged in the vicious war with the Taliban climbed from 5500 to 7800.

Slightly to the west, Iran remained defiant after the UN Security Council unanimously banned weapons sales to the Islamic state and froze the assets of key Iranians to push Tehran into suspending its uranium enrichment.

In the US, sales of homes fell by 3.9%, the lowest rate in seven years. People started talking about a sub-prime market but no-one on this side of the Atlantic took much notice.

APRIL The Royal Navy become embroiled in a Carry On Up The Gulf debacle when 15 British personnel were seized by Iran during a routine patrol in disputed waters. The sailors were paraded on Iranian television, with particular focus on the only female captive, Leading Seaman Faye Turney, who was made to appear wearing an Islamic headdress, confessing to the crimes of trespass and spying.

Turney and her colleagues were pawns in a tense, 13-day standoff between the West and Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's hardline regime in what could be a precursor to the next venue for war in the Middle East.

On their release the military personnel were allowed to sell their stories to the British newspapers, an order that was swiftly rescinded by an embarrassed defence secretary, Des Browne. The diminutive Arthur Batchelor, one of the captives, was lambasted by the other tabloids when he told the Daily Mirror that he'd cried and that his captors had called him Mr Bean and stolen his iPod. Amid withering criticism, the Ministry of Defence banned further story sales.

Five members of a UK al-Qaeda cell were jailed for life over their role in a failed fertiliser bomb plot.

Virginia Tech joined the annals of US gun atrocities when a student killed 32 people and then turned the weapon on himself in what was the country's worst shooting rampage.

Boris Yeltsin, the hero of the failed coup d'etat of August 1991 and flamboyant former Russian president, died aged 76.

Mortgage defaults in California hit an all-time high and house prices stagnated in the US. In Britain everyone carried on as normal and Gordon Brown, Tony Blair and Jack McConnell predicted economic disaster if the SNP won the forthcoming Scottish parliament election.

MAY The disappearance of three-year-old Madeleine McCann from apartment 5A in the Ocean Club resort in the Algarve village of Praia da Luz became an international news story. The personal tragedy of Kate and Gerry McCann, something every parent can empathise with, was played out in the full glare of the media spotlight.

There were more questions than answers as the weeks and then months progressed, as "sightings" of Madeleine, from Belgium to Morocco, came to nothing. A local British-born man, Robert Murat, was questioned and declared an arguido, or formal suspect, after a tip-off from a British journalist who told police he seemed suspicious. Friends of Murat, friends of the McCanns and the McCanns themselves were questioned as witnesses.

Since Portuguese law bars police from giving information about an ongoing investigation, local tabloids, translated and amplified by British reporters, filled the gap.

The story continued to dominate the news agenda for weeks and, in a series of startling developments months later, it was reported that DNA samples from the McCanns' flat and a car they had rented weeks after the disappearance suggested that Madeleine's body had been present in both. The wild speculation that the youngster's body had been carried in the rental car was almost certainly wrong. Kate and Gerry were again questioned and this time made arguidos - mainly because of "contradictions" in their and their friends' testimony about what had happened on May 3. As the year wore on we learned a lot about the McCanns, about Portuguese police practice, but nothing about the fate of missing Madeleine.

Scotland had a new government - the SNP won one more seat than Labour in the third Holyrood election. Nationalist leader Alex Salmond formed a historic minority government with the support of two Green MSPs.

The SNP had 32.9% of the vote, the highest in the party's history, compared with Labour's 32.2%, and 47 MSPs to Labour's 46. For Labour leader Jack McConnell it was all over and he resigned in August. Wendy Alexander went on the replace him, unopposed, the following month .

The whole election process was marred by a voting debacle that created 150,000 spoiled ballot papers, prompting an investigation that cast blame on all, but responsibility on the then Scottish secretary, Douglas Alexander.

The sense that Britain would not be quite the same again extended to Northern Ireland where Sinn Fein and the DUP entered a power-sharing agreement. Martin McGuinness and the Rev Ian Paisley once sworn enemies, took centre-stage in the strangest political pairing in the province's troubled history.

France elected a new leader - Nicolas Sarkozy overwhelmingly defeated the Socialist candidate Segolene Royal, replacing Jacques Chirac as president.

He promised to "rupture" France away from its reliance on a bloated public sector and an overdrawn welfare state. By the end of the year he had started taking on and facing down the country's trade union movement.

In Lebanon, dozens were killed in battles between troops and militants in a Palestinian refugee camp.

JUNE The rains that fell during June 25 on Hull and surrounding areas flooded 24,000 homes and helped make the British summer of 2007 the wettest since 1766. The following month, nine other counties further south, including Gloucestershire, Berkshire and Worcestershire, also fell victim to flooding. Rivers swelled and burst their banks, drains backed up and spewed their filthy contents in torrents onto the streets and people ran, or swam, for their lives. The water picked up cars, washed through homes, destroyed gardens and killed pets. The worst flooding in 200 years claimed the lives of 11 people.

After a decade in power and leading the Labour Party to an unprecedented three election victories, Tony Blair stepped down as prime minister. A showman to the final curtain call, he won a standing ovation from the House of Commons after his "that is that, the end" flourish during his ultimate Prime Minister's Questions on June 27. By standing down as an MP too, Blair freed himself to take up his new post as Middle East peace envoy, but he left his successor Gordon Brown with a Labour government trailing in many polls because of Iraq.

In the turbulent Middle East, Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip after weeks of fighting, while in the West Bank, Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas swore in an emergency government. The US and EU announced they would resume aid but not to Gaza. In Iraq, the revered Shia al-Askariya mosque at Samarra was again bombed - an attack in 2006 saw a huge surge in violence - and Shias blew up two Sunni mosques in retaliation.

Three days after Gordon Brown became prime minister, and a day after two car bombs were found in London, Scotland experienced its first terrorist attack since Lockerbie. Two alleged Islamic extremists, one a doctor, drove a Jeep into the security bollards at the entrance of a busy Glasgow Airport on the first Saturday of the local school holidays. The car carried explosive gas canisters and although it burst into flames on impact, most of the containers remained intact. A few bystanders were injured, and were treated at nearby Royal Alexandra Hospital where one of the alleged terrorists worked. The driver of the car, Kafeel Ahmed, 27, died a month later from his burns, and others suspected of being involved in the attack were apprehended on the M6. All the suspects in the case were foreign recruits to the NHS.

An unlikely hero emerged from the acrid smoke at the airport. John Smeaton, a 31-year-old baggage handler, had come to the aid of the police by kicking one of the attackers and dragging a holiday-maker to safety. He maintained that three other men deserved equal praise for bravery - one sustained a broken leg - but none of them conveyed the gallus Glasgow sensibilities of John Smeaton.

"Glasgow doesnae accept this," Smeaton told a TV news team. "If you come tae Glasgow, we'll set aboot ye."

Laughing in the face of terror might be displacement activity of the highest order, but Smeatomania swept Scotland and although he never looked entirely comfortable with fame, John Smeaton was lauded by press and politicians alike.

JULY With his 10-year torment over, a smiling Gordon Brown surprised critics with his assured handling of a series of crises. From more floods in England that turned the town of Tewksbury into an island, to reaction to the terror attacks, he exuded a calm confidence. He also reached out to political opponents, flaunting a consensual style and pulling off a masterstroke when he invited Baroness Thatcher to tea at Downing Street. It seemed he could do no wrong in these heady early weeks, but as the months wore on, and Brown faltered, Labour MPs found themselves pining for the showman and Blair's ability to get out of a tight corner by gently mocking himself and the messianic ease with which he had mapped out the "vision thing".

Nail-biting for prime ministers was still allowed, but a smoking ban came into effect in England, following the example of Wales, Scotland and the Republic of Ireland. Tobacco sales fell by 11% and parts of Germany and Denmark also introduced bans, as Estonia and France had done, marking a turning point in a global health campaign.

Journalist Alan Johnston was freed 114 days after being kidnapped at gunpoint by the Army of Islam in the Gaza Strip. The BBC reporter said it was "just unimaginably good to be free" and his ordeal had felt like being "buried alive".

The Live Earth concerts were scheduled to run in nine countries, publicising action and awareness of rising emissions to two billion people. But most commentators just wanted to know how Madonna would be arriving.

Four men were found guilty of plotting to bomb London's transport network on July 21, 2005. Muktar Ibrahim, 29, Yassin Omar, 26, Ramzi Mohammed, 25, and Hussain Osman, 28, were convicted at Woolwich Crown Court of conspiracy to murder.

In other legal matters, the Crown Prosecution Service announced that it would not bring any charges against the three Labour aides arrested over the cash-for-honours investigation, bringing an 18-month police inquiry that marred the last days of Tony Blair's leadership to an end.

Troops stormed Islamabad's Red Mosque, ending a bloody standoff with Islamists and killing dozens. Pakistan's supreme court, the crucible for the power struggle against President Musharraf, reinstated chief justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, whose sacking caused riots in Karachi and 39 killings in May. Finally, and perhaps hopelessly, the UN Security Council voted unanimously to spend a record $2bn deploying 26,000 peacekeepers to Darfur in Sudan.

AUGUST In the single deadliest insurgent attack of the Iraq war, truck bombs killed at least 500 members of the Yazidi community in northern Iraq. Violence on the streets of Britain, while less barbaric, was no less shocking. Eleven-year-old Rhys Jones was walking home from football practice when he was shot dead by a youth on a bike. Jones, an ordinary child from an ordinary family, in a part of Liverpool deemed respectable, was the innocent victim of a child-on-child gun murder. His death and other seemingly inexplicable killings that saw 26 teenagers murdered in London alone raised questions about morality in Britain. Shortly after Rhys Jones's death, Conservative leader David Cameron said: "We have had a spate of children killing children, and we have got to ask: what's going wrong in the country?"

According to the Metropolitan Police, the average age of gun crime victims fell from 24 to 19 in the three years to 2006. The Met also said it had intelligence on 171 gangs in London, some of which have members not yet in their teens.

Actor Chris Langham was found guilty of child porn offences and sentenced to 10 months in jail, although he was released early in November.

Protesters staged a climate change camp at an area threatened by the Heathrow expansion. The police resorted to Section 58 of the Terrorism Act to thwart them but the three-day event passed off relatively peacefully.

Another animal disease arrived in the UK - this time it was foot-and-mouth. Hundreds of livestock were slaughtered. Again, it turned out to be a man-made disaster: the virus had escaped through crumbling drains and leaky manholes at a government laboratory in Surrey into a field, where it was picked up on lorry tyres and carried to nearby farms.

In a sign of his diminishing powerbase, President Bush lost his battle to retain his attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, after months of pressure.

Protests begin in Myanmar, formerly Burma, after diesel prices doubled, and India celebrated 60 years of independence, while Pakistan continued to lurch from crisis to crisis.

SEPTEMBER The next plague arrived in Britain, this time an animal disease that few outside farming had heard of, but was much anticipated as it too had spread slowly across Europe from Africa. Bluetongue, a mosquito-borne infection was found in the UK for the first time in a cow at a farm in Suffolk. The virus can kill livestock but does not pose a risk to humans. However, the outbreak further numbed an industry already struggling with movement and export restrictions.

The credit crunch arrived. Northern Rock became the most high-profile British victim of a crisis sparked by low-income American homeowners who'd been lent money they could never afford to pay back. Northern Rock was forced to apply to the Bank of England for emergency funds, in what was to become one of the biggest financial crises in a generation. Cue panic, cue queues.

A human chain of depositors formed at branches as bank customers attempted to reclaim their money. There was some very un-British behaviour, with police called to one branch when a couple staged a sit-down in an attempt to recover their £1m deposit. They left empty-handed. The run on Northern Rock caused the Treasury to pledge that no-one would lose their shirt, a promise which has so far cost £24 billion in lending to the troubled institution. The sheen of middle class security was wiped off property prices as people began to sniff a recession. It was the first of many indicators that Britain was still a nation divided by class, education and income.

As if things weren't bad enough, television viewers were left reeling when it was discovered that Blue Peter had fiddled a competition to name its new cat. The name Cookie had topped the vote but worries about its slang meaning led producers to announce the winning name as Socks. Blue Peter had already been fined £50,000 by media regulator Ofcom in July after a studio guest posed as the winner of another phone-in competition. Similar lapses were uncovered at Children in Need and Comic Relief. And the BBC1 controller was forced to walk after wrongly claiming he had footage of the Queen storming out of a photoshoot "in a huff".

Fortunately television still had its uses. Thanks to the internet the world was able to witness tens of thousands of people joining monks marching through central Yangon in Burma. It was the biggest demonstration against the military junta since the generals crushed the 1988 uprising at an estimated cost of 3000 lives.

The protests, in reaction to the fuel price hikes, were peaceful at first, but when Buddhist monks became involved the demonstrations took on a new momentum. And when, inevitably, the junta cracked down, with 31 recorded deaths and perhaps hundreds more unnoted, the condemnation from the international community was instant. Under pressure from China, the junta opened a token dialogue with Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

The West's number one bogeyman staged a video comeback. Osama bin Laden said in a video marking the sixth anniversary of al-Qaeda's September 11 attacks that the US was still vulnerable, but he made no specific threats.

In his first video appearance for almost three years, the al-Qaeda leader said US President George W Bush was repeating the mistakes of the former Soviet Union by refusing to acknowledge losses in Iraq. In a sign that the tape, acquired by Reuters Television from a web trawler in Europe, was contemporary, bin Laden mentioned new French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. The world mourned the passing of Luciano Pavarotti, the beloved tenor, who died of cancer aged 71.

The most significant event of the year, for the future of the planet, came this month when the Arctic Ocean melted back to a record low point. The extreme melt rate was not predicted by any supercomputer or climate change scenario and scientists began to think that an educated guess for an ice-free Arctic summer might be 2030, well within most of our lifetimes.

OCTOBER In the middle of the Tory Party conference Gordon Brown flew to Iraq and announced that half of the 5000 British troops in Basra will be removed by 2009. But that was not enough to deflect from the pivotal moment of the political year - shadow chancellor George Osborne told the Tory conference that the party would raise the inheritance tax threshold to £1m. Effectively Osborne bought the non-election and a galvanised Tory Party turned the tide in the opinion polls.

Brown went on to blow himself out of the water over the election that never was. In a bungled attempt to destabilise the Tories, Brown's supporters had floated the prospect of a snap vote since July, but with the polls showing that he was neck-neck-with the Tories he bottled the chance at the last possible moment. On a quiet Saturday afternoon, he called broadcaster Andrew Marr to Downing Street to make the announcement. It was a move that transformed the image of Brown from a colossus on the political landscape to a low-down, partisan cynic out for the main chance.

His fortunes are still to revive, but the immediate victim of circumstance was not in his own party. Accused of being too old, Menzies Campbell resigned as Liberal Democrat leader rather than face the long knives he had seen wielded so effectively against his predecessor, Charles Kennedy. His temporary replacement, Vince Cable, said: "Ming has earned the respect, affection and gratitude of the party." But in the end he did not have had enough friends.

Facebook, the internet social networking site with more than 55 million members and the phenomenon of 2007, became worth a poke for Microsoft when it bought a 1.6% stake in the company, valuing the site at $15bn. It made Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg an exceedingly rich 23-year-old.

Nature continued to pound mankind when wildfires devastated southern California and the evil of man demonstrated itself when returning former Pakistani PM Benazir Bhutto survived an attack that killed at least 135 people.

NOVEMBER Oil hit $98 a barrel, but in a petrol-greedy world that went almost unremarked. Controversies, which in quieter times would be shrugged off, engulfed the wounded British prime minister. The loss of two CDs, containing the personal details of half the population, was not his personal responsibility but the blame extended from his beleaguered chancellor to him. Then the disclosure that property developer David Abrahams had donated the best part of £650,000 to Labour through a series of proxies inflicted damage on Brown and the image of the Labour government. The scandal spread to Scotland, where it was discovered that Wendy Alexander's leadership campaign had been financed by a series of £950 cheques - below the £1000 declaration threshold - one of which had come, illegally, from a non-UK resident.

Having been spared 40 lashes, British teacher Gillian Gibbons was pardoned after eight days in jail in Khartoum for naming her class's teddy Mohammed.

After sustaining 443 bone fractures, leaping Snake River Canyon and 13 double-decker London buses, motorcycle stuntman Evel Knievel died aged 69.

Scotland, and England failed to quality for Euro 2008, but the near-miss was cause for national pride in the north and soul-searching in the south.

In Pakistan, deals and double-crosses ended with President Musharraf declaring martial law. The Commonwealth suspended Pakistan but, after promising elections on January 8, General Musharraf promised to end the state of emergency, stood down as army chief and was sworn in as civilian president. Five thousand of his opponents have been arrested, chief justice Chaudhry has been placed under house arrest and lawyers continue violent street protests.

Following the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's final report saying the evidence is now "unequivocal", UN secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon called on the US and China to play a more constructive role in addressing the crisis. The first response came from Australia, where climate change denier and Conservative PM John Howard was defeated in a general election.

DECEMBER John Darwin, a prison officer who went missing on a canoe trip in 2002, walked into a London police station and announced: "I think I am a missing person." In the following days, Darwin overcame his amnesia and the nation was enthralled by the story of how he and his wife, from Hartlepool, ended up up in the Venezuelan housing market.

Vladimir Putin, who'd started sending long-range bombers back onto probing missions across Europe, backed long-time ally Dmitry Medvedev to succeed him as president next year. Medvedev backed Putin to be prime minister.

Apple's iPhone went on sale and was snapped up by up to 40,000 people during its first weekend in British shops.

In spite of a major US intelligence report saying Iran stopped developing nuclear weapons in 2003, Bush said Tehran was still a threat.

EU leaders signed the Lisbon Treaty, pledging to concentrate on practical challenges facing citizens, such as global warming. Gordon Brown again mishandled the media by avoiding the signing ceremony and adding to the impression that he was as dithering over Europe as he was with much else. He knows the battle is far from over and there is all to play for in 2008.

US authorities announced they would free four British residents held without charge at Guantanamo Bay.

British forces handed control of Basra over to Iraqi forces, but military commanders conceded they are mired in a decades-long struggle in Afghanistan. Gordon Brown's final assessment of the year was rather more upbeat, indicating Britain was winning what many still view as an unwinnable war. A barbaric end to the year came with the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan's former prime minister and opposition leader just 13 days before a general election she was well-placed to win.

In the last days of 2007 there were further eyewitness reports that allegedly placed Robert Murat outside the apartment from which Madeleine McCann disappeared on May 3.