In search of inspiration
Updated on 19 December 2006
Channel 4 Political Awards 2006: what links Mo Mowlam, William Hague, Dr David Kelly and Jamie Oliver?
If you're a pub quiz fan, here's one of those ludicrously trivial questions to which it might one day be useful to know the answer. What links Mo Mowlam, William Hague, Dr David Kelly and Jamie Oliver?
Clue: it's nothing to do with riding scooters, wearing things on their heads or being doctors. It is in fact that all have come top of the annual poll of Channel 4 News viewers to find their most influential or inspiring political figure.
In fact the list of the last few winners reads as follows:
1998 Mo Mowlam
2000 Tony Blair
2001 William Hague
2002 Tony Benn
2003 Dr David Kelly
2004 Boris Johnson
2005 Jamie Oliver
You'll notice an abrupt departure from the established pattern in 2003, when we decided that we shouldn't confine the award purely to the nation's elected representatives.
After a temporary return to normality the following year (although it was Boris's pilgrimage to apologise to the people of Merseyside that prompted his win rather than the excellence of his Commons oratory), our viewers lit upon the Chef Laureate last year and awarded him the honour for services to school meals.
Not only that, but the runner-up was Shami Chakrabarti from Liberty. George Galloway was the highest-placed politico, and that might possibly have been helped by the voting period coinciding with his internment in the Big Brother house. Or maybe not.
I was at the Channel 4 Political Awards when the winner was announced, and it's fair to say that quite a few MPs shared our viewers' judgement. Boris himself later wrote that a knighthood was in order. Others weren't so keen. Iain Dale called it 'evidence that politics was being dumbed down'.
Well, whether you feel dumb or dumber, 2006 has all but passed, and it's your turn to vote again. First, you can nominate your favourite, and then, after Christmas, you can choose from a short-list of six.
The winner will be unveiled - if you know what I mean - at the 2006 Awards event in February. In truth, the politicians have fought back this year, seizing back the initiative from the celebrity interlopers: plotting, blogging and filming themselves at every turn, even winning libel victories.
Crucially, they've made politics more of a bare-knuckle contest again, and that's just inside the Cabinet. That's not to say that non-parliamentary figures haven't made a political impact. In a year of symbols, we've had the contrasting cases of the teaching assistant sacked for refusing to take off her veil, and the British Airways check-in worker who was told she couldn't wear a cross.
Green politics has been big too, though curiously, it's a movement that seems to lack an iconic individual, a Jamie Oliver figure to galvanise debate and then action. Maybe, just maybe, Channel 4 News viewers will coalesce around the unlikely figure of Sir Nicholas Stern, whose eponymous report seemed to capture the national mood of self-flagellation over our rising emissions.
Fortunately, it's up to you to tell us who you think has been the most inspiring political figure in Britain this year. Yes, we do insist you confine your choice to Britain, which rules out the Latin Americans Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales, your long-term favourites George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, and Ferenc Gyurcsany, the Hungarian Prime Minister who admitted he'd lied to win a General Election.
