REFLECTIONS on 2020 and the personalities of the year dominated the comment sections of the newspapers on the first day of the new year.

Daily Mail

Jan Moir singled out Captain Sir Tom Moore, who raised £33m with his laps around the garden for the NHS, as the top of her list of 2020 heroes.

“A bus, train, police puppy, powerboat, garden and a horse were named after him,” she said. “Also heroes are the war generation, who went through six years of much worse than this.”

All the retirees who came back to work for the NHS came second, followed by the Queen for her ‘vintage and lovely’ broadcast at the start of the pandemic about people meeting together again one day.

The ‘villains’ included Kim Kadashian who was, she said, ‘oblivious to the suffering around the world’. “In October the reality star shared pictures with her 190 million online followers of her Gatsby-esque 40th birthday celebrations on a private island,” she said.

Phillip Green, who took advantage of the furlough scheme, to pay his staff instead of dipping into his own billions also featured, as did Dominic Cummings and Dr Catherine Calderwood for breaking the Covid rules they helped create.

The Daily Express

Ross Clark said 2020 would go down as the most miserable year of many people’s lives.

“Yet, even though 2021 begins under a very dark cloud of rising Covid cases and deaths, there is every reason to hope it might pleasantly surprise us with what it eventually brings,” he said. “At the risk of sounding like one of those football managers who responds to a 3-0 defeat by telling reporters “there’s lot of positives to take out of this”, it is possible to see the foundations of a far better future.”

News of a vaccine was just a dream even two months ago, he said, and, with the help of all those who volunteered to help the NHS at the start of the crisis, ‘there is no reason why we shouldn’t match what Israel has achieved, vaccinating 5.2 percent of its population in just nine days’.

The Guardian

Marina Hyde wondered if Boris Johnson was making any new year resolutions.

“If so he might consider trying to develop a stiff upper lip this year,” she said. “It looks like we’re going to need it.”

She said the Prime Minister was too concerned with his own feelings, constantly telling us in his addresses how he hated having to impose new restrictions, that he put off doing things until he was forced to do even worse.

“Buck up, toughen up, show a stiff upper lip – I’m sure there’s some archive Boris Johnson column out there lamenting that these are now deemed inappropriate responses by “the PC brigade”,” she said.

“Either way, I am happy to oblige him by considering them easily the most suitable exhortations in this particular case. For God’s sake, prime minister – do man up.”