The Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year Awards 2009

17 October 2009

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Our political representatives have returned to Westminster, and the air is still thick with the Ghosts of Expenses Past.

Our political representatives have returned to Westminster, and the air is still thick with the Ghosts of Expenses Past. As MPs are ordered to pay back their more extravagant claims — with most of them complaining as they do so — you’d be forgiven for thinking that there isn’t a single decent one amongst them. But you’d be wrong. For the past few weeks, our readers have been highlighting the diamonds in the rough, via their nominations for The Spectator/Threadneedle Readers’ Representative Award.

This week, Paul Wheeler has nominated the Conservative MP Ed Vaizey for his efforts at helping people who lost their savings during the crunch: ‘Ed has been an absolute rock to hundreds of angry and frightened citizens; explaining the unexplainable and challenging the powerful.’ While Stephen Lamley writes that Daniel Hannan has recently ‘enhanced his credentials as the thinking person’s Conservative’. And Calum Mercer praises Iain Duncan Smith as ‘an example to all politicians on how to improve politics and the community’.

But it’s not just Conservatives who are getting nominated. Ed Bartlett’s vote goes to James Purnell: ‘a genuine reformer who had the courage to take on Brown’. While one plucky soul, Neil Clark, nominates George Galloway for being ‘one of the few MPs not tied to the neocon/neoliberal junta that has dominated British politics for so long and which has embroiled us in a series of catastrophic and very costly wars’. It’s fair to say that Neil’s is a fairly solitary voice in the voting so far.

There’s still time for you to register your own vote. We are accepting nominations until 5 p.m. on Monday, 26 October. So please go to www.spectator.co.uk/parliamentarian to make and argue your choice. The author of the best-written nomination will receive a bottle of champagne and two tickets to the Spectator/Threadneedle awards lunch at Claridges. Good luck.

www.threadneedle.co.uk