A wonderful time was had by all at the Utter Arse of the Year awards

A glittering cast list, delicious food and spectacular entertainment — I just wish you could have been there. But tickets were at a premium for The Spectator’s prestigious Utter Arse of the Year awards ceremony held, as ever, in the council chamber at Tower Hamlets. The meal, prepared by the exciting left-wing lesbian cook Jack Monroe, consisted of her famous kale pesto pasta on a bed of shredded back copies of the Guardian. As we munched away, a troop of locally sourced Bangladeshi mime artists enacted the setting up of an east London caliphate and — to the delight of the audience — silently decapitated several infidels sitting near the stage. As the black flag of the Islamic State was raised above our heads, the compère for the evening, Jon Snow, from Channel 4 News, took to the rostrum and the real business began. It has been a fabulous year for arses, he told us, perhaps the best year on record. Arses everywhere you look, he chuckled — and at that moment, through fiendishly clever technology, a giant hologram of the revolutionary comedian Russell Brand appeared beside him, transmitted live from his £76,000 per year flat in nearby Hoxton. The Russell hologram entertained the audience with a stream of indecipherable, pretentious, sub-adolescent balls before (again, praise to the technical team) disappearing in a puff of smoke up his own backside. How we all cheered!

That was an excellent foretaste of the proceedings. Snow then welcomed the leader of the Labour party, Ed Miliband, on to the stage to do his famously hilarious impersonation of someone trying desperately to appear normal while undertaking a range of simple everyday tasks — such as standing still, eating a sandwich, breathing etc. On the screen behind his head was displayed a strange photomontage of nine or ten distressed people, some wearing restraints, others gibbering maniacally, two of them in a permanent vegetative state.