The New Statesman doesn’t do political awards. I’ve always thought it a shame to leave the field clear for Channel 4 and the Spectator, but I also recognise that parliamentarians are the last people on earth who need another boost to their egos. It is particularly difficult to pass judgement this year, as the political class (with a handful of exceptions) was miserably implicated in the failure to foresee the scale of the economic calamity about to hit the country. It is not as if we had insufficient warning. Northern Rock collapsed in September 2007, remember, an event that should have alerted us to the possibility that the credit crunch was likely to hit very hard in 2008.
Another difficulty is that a single politician has dominated the year’s proceedings, not just in his attempts to rescue the country from imminent economic collapse, but, in his own estimation at least, saving the entire world from descent into a pre-industrial barter system. That is the Prime Minister himself, Gordon Brown.
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