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Saturday 22 November 2008

The winners of the political year

This is the text of the remarks that Matthew d’Ancona, editor of The Spectator, delivered at the Spectator Threadneedle Parliamentarian of the Year awards lunch at Claridge’s Hotel.

It may look and sound like the original Constitutional Treaty and retain 90 per cent of the original Treaty’s content, but it is definitely not the same thing, said ministers. And anyone who claimed otherwise was a cad, a bounder and a xenophobe – except of course all those foreign politicians happily celebrating the fact that they had pulled a fast one on the British again by dressing up the Constitution as something called an amending treaty.

Enter our winner, whose European Scrutiny Select Committee demonstrated in cool analysis and then heated face-to-face exchanges that the Reform Treaty was, indeed, substantially the same as the fallen Constitution and, no less important, that the deal Britain had struck was not quite as marvellous as ministers claimed.

One judge hailed this as “Parliament at its finest.”

In recognition of this, our winner is the MP for Linlithgow and Falkirk East, Michael Conarty.

PEER OF THE YEAR

The judges’ discussions focused on the general excellence of the Upper House this year in acting as a brake on the wilder decisions of the Commons, and the sound sense enshrined in its walls – a tradition we hoped would not be drained by the next and apparently inevitable phase of reform.

Indeed, it was suggested that rather like the island of Malta winning the George Cross after the Second World War, the award should be bestowed upon the whole second chamber. However, the practicalities of getting all 751 Lords Spiritual and Temporal up here on stage eluded us.

Instead, we quickly decided to give this honour to a peer who is, in fact, without peer.

At the next election there for the first time will be citizens entitled to vote who were not born when she was Prime Minister. But the judges were struck not only by her continued grip on the national imagination but by the enthusiasm with which senior parliamentary figures – not to mention visiting international statesmen – still flock to her side. It seemed fitting that in February she became the first living Prime Minister to be honoured with a statue in the House of Commons.

“I might have preferred iron but bronze will do,” she declared at its unveiling;

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