Ed Miliband stole the show at this year’s Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year awards. The Labour leader, who won a new prize called Political Speech of the Year (for the energy freeze pledge, which ‘transformed his fortunes’), took the chance to read out a Sunday Sport story which accused his ‘Belgian communist’ father of ‘killing a cat’ when cycling through the British countryside during the war. Ed charmed the crowd by being funny, good on camera and, you know, normal.
Home Secretary Theresa May, who took the Politician of the Year award, despite her recent burka-related difficulties, was a hoot. Ms May ended her amusing speech by saying that the Spectator archive proved that we had been saying the same thing about the future of country for 185 years, to which Fraser Nelson replied: ‘Yes, we’ve been right all along’.
Tristram Hunt, Labour shadow education spokesman and the Spectator’s Newcomer of the Year, sailed close to the wind by imagining a Spectator free school: Rod Liddle would be in charge of diversity, Charles Moore would be the ‘High Master’, yet there were worries about whether Boris would pass the CRB check.
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