Why Harman won

Bunnykins

And this is the Spectator? Utterly gobsmacked!

Verity

What do you think of the Neather revelations, Fraser? You've twice promised a blog, yet you have never delivered.

I'm sure denizens of Old Queen Street monitor other British blogs and I am sure you have noted that this is the biggest explosion in British politics for perhaps a decade. You will have noted from many other posts here, that we still await hearing from you.

I think it's a safe bet that you are never going to deliver it.

Nicholas

If you've been busy working on this rather than an analysis of Neathergate I fear you have been wasting your time.

Not interested in Harm The Nation in any way, shape or form - other than the promise of her being turfed out at the election - whenever we finally get one - so that the mad bitch no longer holds power over us.

Nigel Sedgwick

Harman?! Bye, bye.

Colin Pritchard

Harman Spectator/Threadneedle parliamentarian of the year!!!!

I smell a double bluff akin to Cameron going easy on Brown at PMQs. An election imminent, who would we like to see leader and deputy of the Labour party?

Tankus

Harman is an insult

emil

April 1st already, what happened to the winter?

Dorothy Wilson

Mrs Dromey! Heaven help us!

The Huntsman

"But if you were to give......Cameron and award, what would it be for?"

'The Phillipe Petain award for The Biggest Sell-Out Of The Year'?

Tankus

Fraser ... you've got the only plummy Scots accent that I've ever heard ....

I thought that Lloyd Grossman was fairly unique in the vowel dept. (Mid Atlantic) but I think you top him (Trans Hadrian ?)

Bunnykins

I'm hoping that this is a case of softening up the opposition before you stick the knife in. Otherwise, what gives? This is ridiculous.

David Ossitt

FRASER NELSON

“But her critics must admit that a) she actually has an agenda, unlike so many of her colleagues b) she advances her agenda powerfully, as she did every day with her displays of political pyrotechnics when she stood in for Gordon Brown and c) she has moulded her agenda into legislation in the form of the Equalities Bill. It’s the last part which really clinched it for her”.

Yes she has an agenda; so had Stalin, Pol Pot and Hitler, they also advanced their agenda powerfully and every day they re-moulded their worlds.

You have brought dishonour to and devalued the Spectator/Threadneedle parliamentarian of the year.

With choices like this it is high time you stopped this horrid nasty charade.

Nicholas Hallam

"Her displays of political pyrotechnics when she stood in for Gordon Brown".

If reading out notes in a leaden, hectoring tone can count as pyrotechnics. Ah well...

DavidDP

I think it's great you can see past political divides, Fraser. Brings credit to the awards.

denverthen

The relatively liberal use of the ghastly term "no brainer" in this luvvie blogpost is fairly telling.

TrevorsDen

You are out of your tiny minds. What an utter absurdity.

Just shows what a load of cr@p 'awards' are. If you say you have done it to annoy Brown ... well that might make sense but it would still make the 'award' worthless.

The flights of fancy over Neathrgate have nothing to do with this. Your justification is that Harman is traitorous and Mandelson disingenuous.

Peter From Maidstone

You are taking the p**s out of us. Much more and I won't bother buying the Spectator any more and will stick with Standpoint even if it is monthly.

Alex Creel

Can we have some sort of 'opt out' next year..I won't sleep knowing that my magazine purchase helped pay for Mandy's dinner. Why couldn't Liddle have gone postal and done the world a favour!?

john miller

How strange.

Bit like Vinnie Jones winning "Footballer of the Year".

Nicholas

Verity, where are you? I would like to hear you comment about the dreadful woman as she appears in the heading photograph. It always brightens up my day when you draw our attention to her appearance. It's like the head of a snake on the body of a hippo - wearing a giraffe suit.

Michael Booth

So, no discussion over Neathergate but a long justification for Harriet Harman and her 'agenda'. Her agenda mind, not the country's... Really this is too much.

Snowman

I for one like Ms Harman. With her mouth shut, she ain't at all bad.

Tankus

Do the speccie bloggers have a bet on who gets the most posts ? , Is the Harman win a brazen attempt to troll and win ?

Derek

Mr. Nelson and his colleagues seem unaware of, or no longer able or willing to make, the distinction between "politician" and "parliamentarian". From now on the noble award of Parliamentarian of the Year has been subverted and in future the Spectator's instructions to its panel will be: "Get thee glass eyes, and like a scurvy politician, seem to see the things thou dost not."

Tiberius

Fraser, once the Tories are in government, I take it the squiffy deliberations will cease.

You and I both know that our children's welfare depends on Cameron and Osborne succeeding in clearing up with the cesspool bequeathed them by NuLab.

I'm not an intemperate sort, but watching Campbell spouting his hypocrisy in the This Week studio almost cost me a new television set.

No one in the NuLab cabal deserves anything but a trial in The Hague.

J H Holloway

Good Lord, have you lot never heard a Morningside accent before?

'Sechs is what the cooal comes in...'

That's right, isn't it FN?

EC

Because Andrew Neil said so?

Yam Yam

Hmmn. Stranger than fiction - as someone once said of another no less controversial parliamentarian.

Publius

David Ossitt writes:
"You have brought dishonour to and devalued the Spectator/Threadneedle parliamentarian of the year."

--Yes, quite. But do you think they give a jot what we think? They're far more concerned with cosying up to their Village friends and furthering their own careers.

Scary Biscuits

The underlying problem with the New Spectator, is betrayed by Fraser's closing paragraph, starting 'a good time was had by all'.

Fraser isn't a luvvie but if he spends too much time with them, he's bound to get biassed. He should spend more time with his paying customers, as that's his job. In the glory days of British journalism and free speech, a pol like Sayeeda Warsi wouldn't have been seen dead supping with a journo from Punch or the Spectator and vice versa. Like many of the other posters here, I long for the day when MSM returns to being a medium rather than part of the establishment and great mags like the Spectator reverse their declining circulation and relevance.

General Zod

Verity: "I'm sure denizens of Old Queen Street monitor other British blogs and I am sure you have noted that this is the biggest explosion in British politics for perhaps a decade. You will have noted from many other posts here, that we still await hearing from you."

Ridiculous. It has been fallen upon by the most right wing blogs, but after initial interest has been almost ignored by just about everyone else.

Just because it feeds your prejudices doesn't make it important. In the real world, nobody, but nobody is talking about Neather.

Tim Carpenter LPUK

I thought the term "Parliamentarian" applied to someone who respected, upheld and made expert use of the letter and spririt of the House and the system.

If the letter and spirit is embodied in the conduct, results* and attitude of Harman, then it is not despair but resolve to rid or reform, not reward that comes to my mind.

* I cannot bring myself to use the term achievements

Chuck Unsworth

I'd agree with David Ossitt.

“But her critics must admit that a) she actually has an agenda, unlike so many of her colleagues b) she advances her agenda powerfully, as she did every day with her displays of political pyrotechnics when she stood in for Gordon Brown and c) she has moulded her agenda into legislation in the form of the Equalities Bill. It’s the last part which really clinched it for her”

Yes, and? These are the determining criteria? So this is an award for town-hall politics then, a recognition of mediocrity. 'Agenda'? Pah!

One would have hoped for rather higher standards than this.

Marcus Cotswell

I can't help thinking you're not doing Geoffrey Howe's resignation justice there.

Sam ARMSTRONG

You will lose readership if you persist in playing these childish games.

Sam ARMSTRONG

HANG HARRIET HARMAN

Sam ARMSTRONG

The STATE has infiltrated and is controlling The Speccie.

SUSAN HILL

I am absolutely appalled. As I posted on another thread ..'Harriet HARMAN ?' Please tell me this is a joke.

Jim

"Fraser isn't a luvvie but if he spends too much time with them, he's bound to get biassed"

I think "biassed" is what you get from too many free lunches, Prescott-style!

Dr Iago

Zod,
Your real world isn’t mine in which a large number of friends, associates and family from across the political spectrum have been outraged by Neathers’ comments and their subsequent disappearance from MSM commentary and analysis. This absence is simply a continuation of the fawning servility which allowed a small elite to pursue a covert political agenda of social engineering to which popular opinion (never consulted) would have been opposed, most vociferously within their core support (the white working class). It is this complicit silence by the MSM which is of greater concern than Neather itself, as with a supine client media, who knows what future horrors await to be sprung on us the voters by an increasingly half-witted and detached political class. The Spectator needs to distinguish itself from this complicity and stand up and be counted. Given the delay in the publishing of my previous blog post I can only assume that this occurred whilst waiting for editorial consent. Kudos to Fraser for allowing critical commentary on Coffeehouse, can we now please have the promised forum for a discussion of Neather.

anne allan

wouldn't it be more honest for the Speccie introduced a new category?
Award for "Pol who has done the most to b*****up readers' blood pressure".

Watt Tyler

"c) she has moulded her agenda into legislation in the form of the Equalities Bill. It’s the last part which really clinched it for her."

Given that Harmans agenda is particularly nasty, I have to come to the conclusion that Fraser Nelson is an idiot. Don't look to these quarters for leadership towards the change you are yearning for.

Ben Elford

I'd assumed that the Spectator annual awards were nowadays intended to be satirical; if so, it's lost on many of your commenters today.

Worried of Woking

A dreadful error of judgement. Surely that ghastly woman (practically the only woman there too) - and her 'agenda' you admire her for having - stands for everything your (soon to be ex-) readers loathe about the way the country has declined. You should be exposing them for the frauds and fakes they are, not cosying up to them.

Ian C

You were taking the p*ss weren't you, Fraser?

logdon

Ditto all above.

Have you lost your effing minds?

logdon

Did anyone see even that lefty du jour Will Self's little aside on Neather?

An honourable man who would not exaggerate for self aggrandisement, was his conclusion.

So there we are, the stamp of approval from such an unlikely source.

Maybe one day we'll read a detailed analysis in these august pages.

There's a whole tale of high deception and gerrymandering which puts even the high priestess of the game, Dame Shirley Porter into total shade.

Sorry to labour it, but you know and we know that in the fullness of time the bombshell will erupt.

Where better for the blue touch paper than here?

Frank P

Ben Elford

"I'd assumed that the Spectator annual awards were nowadays intended to be satirical; if so, it's lost on many of your commenters today."

Piss poor satire is oft times turned against the satirist by those who are (allegedly) lampooned. This was certainly the case here, as it provided a platform for the 'victims to strut their stuff; the 'neck-stroking' and 'bottom-patting' dragged all present into the realm of poovery and simpering mutual congratulation. How any of you can stay in a room with any of these odious shits without puking defeats me. Not that I'm surpised: birds of a feather ....

Frank P

Jim

You beat me to it, but I was thinking 'bi-assed' in another sense.

2trueblue

Unbelievable, absolutely unbelievable. What an insult. You could not have picked more unlikeable people on any level.

Amadeus Plonquer

Zod says: 'In the real world, nobody, but nobody is talking about Neather.'

I guess that makes me and my Political Science class at Beijing University a bunch of nobodies. This is an issue that is being watched most closely here in China - and elsewhere around the world.

The issue itself is explosive and in better days would have been enough to bring down a government. Today it's reduced to a fight between the forces of liberty who wish to air the issue in public and the spin-meisters of No 10 who wish to bury it.

It's plainly obvious who's currently winning this battle. Anyone who claims this is a trivial issue can be nothing other than a troll working for No 10 (a useful idiot) and trying to bury it. At this juncture that would seem to include the Spectator editorial team.

As a political issue Neather will simply NOT go away, will be resurrected at election time and will be accompanied by predictable new revelations and banner headlines in the Sun and elsewhere.

This is how modern Political Intelligence works.

Fergus Pickering

I think you were quite right and I cannot understand why people who want Cameron to win the next election cannot see it. GO HATTIE GO! FIND 'EM AND KILL 'EM!

DavidSmith

The awards for Andrew Tyrie and Paul Farrelly were well deserved, exactly the sort of MP we need more of, and that it would be good to see more coverage of.

It sadly says a lot for the coffee house posters (though not I suspect the readers of the Speccie, interesting how they diverge) that only one post has been on either of these, and instead people who want the Speccie to be the right wing version of the NewStatesman.

hadrian

As we Glaswegians say of such ladies, they are 'nippy sweeties' and they don't come much nippier than Ms H. Awarding her this prize simply devalues it, in my book.

John Hall

Madness. Utter madness.

Lord Trencherman

I understand that Harriet Harman is going to ask in the house why religious organisations remain exempt from the 1975 sex discrimination act.
cf. bohodotcom

John R

Pontius Pilate would have beaten Harriet if those were the criteria.

I want to marry Verity and have her babies.

Martyn

I find the term "Harperson" offensive. p"Person" clearly is sexist - a neutral term is "perkin"

So please call her Harriet Harperkin from now on.