Parliamentarian of the Year: the winners

The 23rd annual Threadneedle/ Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year lunch took place last Thursday at Claridge’s. The prizes were presented by the Rt Hon. David Cameron MP, Leader of the Opposition. Welcoming Mr Cameron, Matthew d’Ancona, the editor of The Spectator, observed that, in less than a year as Conservative leader, he had dislodged Beckham as the most popular Dave in the country, shown his fellow Tories that a glacier is not just a kind of mint, and taught the political world that green is more than the colour of envy.

NEWCOMER OF THE YEAR Julia Goldsworthy MP

The judges faced a difficult task selecting one MP from the intake of 2005 — which, in the words of Sinatra, was a very good year. The winner unseated a Labour incumbent to become the youngest MP in England, and has already risen to a senior position on the Lib Dem front bench. At a traumatic time for her party, which led to the resignation of a leader still popular with his membership and the public, she dared to ask difficult and painful questions at precisely the moment of her career when one would have expected unprincipled reticence.

INQUISITOR OF THE YEAR Angus MacNeil MP

When the winner began his dogged pursuit of the loans for honours affair and took his complaint to Scotland Yard, few thought it would amount to much more than another doomed lunge by the Scottish National Party for headlines. But — as Michael Palin didn’t quite say — ‘Nobody expects the Scottish Inquisition!’ The winner stuck to his guns, kept up the pressure and triggered the mother of all credit searches — revealing that there were more loans being fixed in Westminster in the run-up to the 2005 election than in a sofa warehouse on New Year’s Eve. The police investigation activated by this tartan Torquemada continues to rock Westminster.

PEER OF THE YEAR The Rt Hon Lord Tebbit CH

The judges were swift and unanimous in their decision in this category. In a year in which Mr Cameron restored Tory fortunes, our winner has been the voice of dissent, as steely as it was courteous, the conscience of his party and the spokesman of no-nonsense, blue-in-toothand-claw Conservatism. He was also one of the most sonorous voices of sanity standing up against the government’s uniquely daft proposals to outlaw the so-called ‘glorification of terrorism’.

SPEECH OF THE YEAR Stephen Pound MP It is fashionable to say that Parliament is dead and the art of Cicero with it. So the judges were pleased to report that this was one of the most hotly contested categories.

In the end, the clear winner was a majestic speech delivered in February in the debate on the smoking ban. The winner memorably described what he called his ‘investigative work’ in the pubs of Dublin, the sad huddles of exiled smokers outside, and advised his fellow MPs to ‘buy patio heater shares now’. His oratory was a libertarian tour de force that had the judges coughing with laughter into their illegal ashtrays.

RESIGNATION OF THE YEAR Tom Watson MP

The winner was the most prominent Labour MP to sign a letter in September calling on the PM to name a date for his departure. Resigning from his post as defence minister before he could be sacked, he forced Mr Blair to announce that the Labour party conference in Manchester would be his last as leader. But what particularly impressed the judges was the double-whammy of this resignation. It emerged that our winner had — by an astonishing coincidence — paid a visit to Mr Brown’s home only a few days before the letter was delivered. As a result, the Chancellor was forced to go on television and talk about being ‘inclusive’ through a rictus of fury. The award was accepted on the winner’s behalf by Robert Marshall-Andrews, MP.

MINISTER TO WATCH Andy Burnham MP

The winner, minister of state for health since May, is one of a generation of Labour politicians who have risen through the ranks during the Blair era and are now wondering, as well they might, what the future holds. What the judges admired was his refusal to be a clone, his self-effacing style, and his busy presence on the think-tank circuit; unlike some of those with whom his name is regularly associated, he is much more than a steadily promoted apparatchik.

CAMPAIGNER OF THE YEAR Jon Cruddas MP

This category was hotly contested, with many good causes and their champions in consideration. The winner’s concerns about the rise of the BNP in his own constituency were first given prominence in a Spectator article in April. He has been a fearless campaigner not only against the poison of racism, but also against the relentless concentration of the three main parties upon middle-class swing voters in marginal seats.

PARLIAMENTARIAN OF THE YEAR Richard Bacon MP

The winner was praised by the judges for his meticulous, methodical and relentless use of parliamentary procedure to disclose the truth and reveal a fiasco of epic proportions. Had he not carried out his terrier-like quest, the sheer scale of the foreign prisoner crisis might not have come to light. We might not have known that more than 1,000 such inmates had been released and slipped the net of deportation. That revelation was a material factor in the local elections, forced the sacking of Charles Clarke, and sent the government spiralling into a summer of nightmares. More importantly, against all the Cassandras, it showed how powerful Parliament can still be as a forum in which government is held to account with momentous consequences.

POLITICIAN OF THE YEAR The Rt Hon John Reid MP

No Cabinet member in modern times has held so many portfolios as the winner: he is, so to speak, a Talent of all the Ministries. But the judges felt that he had found the perfect berth in his latest job, and that the Home Office at last had a helmsman ready to tackle its old-fashioned structure and culture.

The judges also admired the way in which he stands up to fanatics — that is, the young extremists brainwashed at the Treasury. They praised him for ensuring that the Labour succession race was not as tediously predictable as we all feared it might be and that the uncertainty principle, one of the props of any democracy, was still alive and well.

The judges were: Matthew d’Ancona (chairman), Andrew Neil (chief executive, The Spectator), Fraser Nelson (The Spectator), Frank Johnson (The Spectator and Daily Telegraph), Trevor Kavanagh (Sun), Patrick Hennessy (Sunday Telegraph), Anne McElvoy (London Evening Standard), Andrew Gimson (Daily Telegraph), Michael White (Guardian), Ann Treneman (Times).