WH AUDEN wondered why people are hopeful for the future while few would wish to live the past year over again. This, to apply Dr Johnson, is the triumph of hope over experience.

When I was a lad at the Methodist Sunday School, I was taught by a creepy bloke whose day job was undertaker’s assistant. In the dusty schoolroom he would terrify us with prophecies about the end of the world, Armageddon and all that stuff. He opened his big, fat black Bible and read the verses about how the end of the world will be signalled by “wars and rumours of wars and earthquakes in diverse places”. After this, we read the newspapers with growing alarm – especially if a new conflict had broken out somewhere or a town was devastated by an earthquake.

It was only when I’d grown up that it dawned on me what that biblical prophecy meant – that the end-time would be a time like any other, unexceptional, nothing out of the ordinary.

For there are always wars and rumours of wars and earthquakes.

So when we gaze into the crystal ball for 2014 we should expect to see only more of the same. It will be a year of fractious electioneering as David Cameron tries every trick and promises us the earth in a golden wrapper in the hope of preventing Ed Miliband and Labour coming to power in a landslide.

Mr Cameron hasn’t a hope.

As the undertaker’s assistant would have said, he has been weighed in the balances and found wanting. So many natural Tory voters are sick of him and will turn to Ukip. This defection will guarantee a huge majority to the most ideologically socialist party since the 1940s. And Mr Cameron – the heir to Blair – will follow in his master’s footsteps and make millions on the memoirs and lectures bandwagon.

The inept and twerpish presidency of Barack – all talk no notion – Obama will totter feebly towards its inevitable dissolution.

What a bright hope he seemed to so many back in 2008 and yet he has proved himself a disaster on the US home front and in foreign policy. His flagship medicare project has flopped. He has divided Congress more bitterly than any president in living memory.

And his catastrophic appeasement of the Iranians – duped by all their lies – will have appalling consequences for America and the world.

What’s left of idealism and liberal reform in the revolutions of the Arab Spring will be swallowed up in total victory for Al Qaida, Salafist terrorists and Sunni militants. Al Qaida has already hoisted its black flag over Iraq. This is a catastrophe for the whole of the Middle East and a dire threat to world peace. Not least of the evil effects will be the intensification of the persecution of Christians, tens of thousands of whom have recently fled from a country where they were a civilising presence for 2,000 years.

Back home the extortionate cost of fuel will increase and its short supply will become shorter still as the Coalition government’s energy policy is a shambles. Mr Cameron will never do what he was reported as intending “to ditch all the Green crap”. Huge subsidies will still be awarded to rich landowners for the privilege of erecting useless windmills on their property. And, while so many other countries transform their economies by means of the fracking revolution, we shall only dither – hamstrung by bureaucratic regulations and held to ransom by the eco-warriors.

So raise a glass and sing lustily tonight, for it’s a hard road in the morning.