Predictions for the next decade are difficult – but a political scandal involving Boris Johnson seems likely

“We’re on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying,” said David Bowie on Newsnight in 1999. “The actual context and the state of content is going to be so different to anything we can envisage at the moment … it’s going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about.”

The author of Diamond Dogs was trying to explain the internet to Jeremy Paxman. That wouldn’t be an easy task even in 2019 – but it was almost impossible at a time when email still seemed like a pretty neat idea. Still, Bowie’s prognosis seems more prescient each year. He seems to have grasped the coming era of disruption better than almost anyone.

“I don’t think we’ve seen the tip of the iceberg,” he said. “What the internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is... unimaginable.”

Fast-forward 20 years, and the Chinese Communist Party is using facial recognition software and ubiquitous smartphone technology to impose instant cash fines and social credit deductions to anyone who crosses a road when the light is red. (“The set is amazing/ it even smells like a street”). But we also have Jason Statham kicking a cap off a bottle. A mixed bag, truly.

So if we are to make some political predictions for the 2020s, what can we glean? Well, maybe best not to be too specific. Although Boris Johnson being involved in some sort of scandal, probably involving his private life, possibly with a walk-on part for Dilyn the rescue pup, well, it seems fairly likely to happen over a 10-year span, right?

Johnson will enjoy a honeymoon period. They all do. But past behaviour is the best guide for future behaviour. Power reveals. What was once seen as a prime minister’s most heroic quality comes in the end to seem like their most gaping flaw. His good humour will come to seem more like a pathological inability to take anything seriously. “You just don’t care for anything because you’re spoilt,” as his girlfriend Carrie Symonds reportedly told him that night in Camberwell. “You have no care for money or anything.”

I’d also hazard that we may not have heard the last of Priti Patel and the ministerial code (last summer, she was found to be accepting £1,000 an hour from an American communications firm Viasat while serving as home secretary) and that Johnson’s administration is likely to become mired in this sort of scandal. Westminster politics in general will come to seem ever more swampy as trade deals are cut and the usual doors revolve between politics, media, tech and the corporate world.

Brexit will prove to be annoying and sapping and bad but obscurely and unprovably bad. Someone else will be blamed. The words “Brexit Betrayal” will ring out in those old Labour heartlands. Nicola Sturgeon will eventually get another Scottish independence referendum but will lose it 52-48. The Houses of Parliament will collapse and the capital will move to York.

The next Labour leader will prove to be a more flexible thinker and capable performer than Jeremy Corbyn – but will face all of the same hurdles. The Liberal Democrats will disband! Wishful thinking: they will continue to lure moderate MPs and thinkers away from the Conservatives and take votes away from Labour, thus having the worse-than-useless effect of giving us governments way to the right of the electorate.

No, the safest prediction is no progressive breakthrough in 2025 – Labour has so much ground to make up; the demographic trends favour older fearful people, not more younger hopeful people – which would mean 19 straight years of Tory rule. I don’t think anyone would claim that this has been achieved at a time when the party is overbrimming with vision and talent. But their motivation for changing the way politics happens is precisely zero. Their motivation for turning Britain into a sort of Downton Abbey-Fox News crossover episode would appear to be quite high.

Culture wars. There will be more culture wars.

Stupid things that you can’t even believe we’re still discussing. There will be a horrible freaky gene-editing scandal. Automation and brute capitalism will kill more jobs. Instead of working less, we will work more – we will accept lower hourly rates to make up our previous earnings and see less of our families and friends.

And yet something has to give, right? One common mistake when looking into the future is to assume the attitudes of the day will hold – which, in 2019, is a sort of twitchy, distracted, defeatist, anxious, cynicism. There will be an enormous financial crash. That seems inevitable. This one might really change things. But there will also be hope. Perhaps it will come from the squeezed political middle, sensible, moderate types, finding some other outlet for their frustrations now that Brexit is (we’re told) going to happen? A majority voted for Remain parties in the last election, remember. More likely it will come from radical fusion of Thunberian green and neo-Corbynite left politics. I don’t think we have heard the last from the basic-income advocates either.

There will be a lot more energy focused on curtailing the power that technology has over our lives, both on an individual level and on a regulatory level. But a new generation will be increasingly cool with internalising it and outsourcing their thoughts to AI. Meanwhile the catastrophic effects of humans on the environment will be impossible to ignore. By 2030, eating meat and driving cars will seem a bit like smoking. But a dark side will emerge to green politics too.

But I think that one of the big shifts is that these three huge areas of disruption in our lives – environmental, economic and technological, which have so far felt like discrete issues, will come to seem inextricably interlinked. It will partly be due to companies like Amazon pushing instant gratification via our phones. All that cardboard packaging, all those underpaid delivery drivers, all that junk – it has a cost. It will be partly due to the enormous environmental cost of storing all the data that we create. The infrastructure challenges are immense. Data already accounts for as much carbon emissions as the aviation industry. Jason Statham kicking the top off a bottle has a cost too.

Something to bear in mind in the coming years. But I suspect we’ll be here at the end of it just the same.