The Shit List 2024

49 Julia Hartley-Brewer

“Genuinely gutted not to have made it on to the New European’s The Shit List 2023”, Hartley-Brewer tweeted last year. Her interview with Palestinian MP Mustafa Barghouti on January 3 seemed like a quickfire attempt to put things right, with Hartley-Brewer talking over her subject, looking at her watch, putting her head in her hands and then telling him “maybe you’re not used to women talking, I don’t know, but I’d like to finish the sentence” and “sorry to have been a woman speaking to you but there you are”. Toothless regulator Ofcom declined to take further action, despite admitting that many of the 17,000-plus complaints considered that Hartley-Brewer’s comments were “motivated by Dr Barghouti’s religion or ethnicity”.

48 Peter Hitchens

When the contrarian columnist Peter Hitchens is not ranting about MI5 – a “Blairite police force”, apparently, led by a man who, in his view, spreads unjustified rumours of threats “which just so happen to justify his enormous budget” – he is explaining why we must get out of what he calls the “always unnecessary” Ukraine war. Hitchens, who must have forgotten about nerve agent attacks on the streets of Salisbury, recently told Daily Mail readers, “I am furious that we, who have no possible interest in this conflict, have been dragged into it.” But despite his view that the security service invents threats and that we shouldn’t be worried by Vladimir Putin, Hitchens still wants a beefed-up military. In a recent Mail piece headlined “We’d barely beat Legoland in a war”, he complained that “the Royal Navy is in its most pathetic state since the Dutch fleet sailed up the River Medway in 1667”. Which means that in “Hitchens Land”, the UK needs to be better prepared to meet threats, but is also over-prepared to meet threats, both at the same time.

47 Suella Braverman

“I’ve been branded mad, bad and dangerous by my own party,” moaned Braverman in the Telegraph last July, marking the first and last time in recent history that the Conservatives have been right about something.

46 Prince Andrew

If it were possible to create a visual representation of all that is wrong with Britain, then it would look something like Prince Andrew. The Duke of York has slid his way through life on an oily film of privilege and entitlement, leaving nothing in his wake but disgrace, disastrous interviews on Newsnight, and a multimillion-pound settlement with a woman who was trafficked by the notorious paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Now he is refusing to leave his 30-room mansion, Royal Lodge, for the nearby Frogmore Cottage, which has a mere 10 bedrooms.

45 Ben Habib

Reform’s axed deputy leader has managed to become even more extreme since being dumped by his ex-chum Nigel Farage, telling Julia Hartley-Brewer that migrants arriving in Britain should immediately be handed “another dinghy into which to climb and then go back to France. If they choose to scupper that dinghy, then yes, they have to suffer the consequences of their actions.” When Hartley-Brewer asked if he would leave them to drown, Habib responded: “Absolutely, they cannot be infantalised to the point that we become hostage to fortune.”

44 Michael Ashcroft

Much like the Two Ronnies’ “Phantom Raspberry Blower of Old London Town”, Ashcroft lurks in the shadows of British politics, emerging occasionally to make a huge stink before scurrying back to his billionaire’s lair in Belize. His main weapon of choice is the scurrilous book, and this year’s effort was the Angela Rayner hatchet job Red Queen, a book so flimsy that even the Telegraph complained that it “prefers triviality to true intelligence”. It sparked weeks of dull stories about Rayner’s housing arrangements, which failed to capture the public imagination or turn the election for the Tories. It also triggered a slew of rumours about the love life of a “senior party figure” in Labour, still exciting the deluded today.

43 Mike Graham

“If Starmer wants the keys to No 10, he should drop net zero”, wrote the TalkTV host and Telegraph columnist in June, just before Keir Starmer picked up the keys to No 10 without dropping net zero. Graham has since declared that the PM will lose the next election if he betrays Brexit – surely an incentive for Labour to rejoin the EU and win in 2029. When not moaning about Starmer, the pundit recently opined that “clever and smug” Have I Got News For You is “not funny any more”. While this is untrue, HIGNFY is certainly not as funny as Graham’s assertion, made quite seriously to an environmental campaigner in October 2021, that it is possible to grow concrete. 

42 Rishi Sunak

The temptation to feel sorry for Rishi Sunak should be resisted. Somewhere along the line the technocrat became captured by the nastiest end of his party, meaning he went into the election with a campaign based almost entirely on repeating the words “stop the boats”. Added to that, he pursued the very stupid policy of trying to deport migrants to Rwanda, a scheme that cost hundreds of millions of pounds and didn’t reduce the number of migrants crossing the Channel. He insisted that Britain should have a “deterrent” to put off the people getting into boats, overlooking the fact that there was already a pretty big deterrent – the very real possibility of drowning. Perhaps Sunak’s most valuable service to the nation was in showing that the ultra-rich are so removed from everyday life that they’re simply not suited for high office.

41 Dan Wootton

Too toxic for even GB News, he is now the compere of Dan Wootton Outspoken, a YouTube channel that in his words will “NOT be regulated by the Ofcommunist censors”. Recent guests include former PM Liz Truss, discussing conspiracy theories about the Southport killings, which Wootton calls “a cover-up of epic proportions”. In October he tweeted in response to a post by the Loose Women presenter Charlene White, posing with her three co-presenters. All four women in the photo were black. Wootton’s comment: “How Woke ITV does diversity”. To which White replied: “Bitterness is a very lonely colour, Dan.”

40 David Coote

In a year that saw the death of Kick It Out founder Herman Ouseley and the ongoing rollout of the Premier League’s No Room For Racism campaign, how depressing to see David Coote, one of England’s top referees, caught on camera calling former Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp a “German cunt”, among other slurs. The football establishment has been quick to assure fans that Coote – also seen on video snorting a white powdered substance – is just an isolated case, but his actions call into question the integrity of the people running Britain’s favourite sport, especially at a time when VAR has put refereeing into sharper focus than ever before.

39 Matthew Goodwin

The once-respected academic is now a full-throated nationalist, to be found ranting on GB News about “extreme mass immigration” and making “British people safe and secure in their own countries”. Goodwin approves of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary – “No riots. No unrest. No drugs. And no mass immigration” – without noticing that no free press, no LGBT rights and ultimately no opposition is also on the cards there. He is also looking forward to “Trump 2”, which he has said on Twitter will normalise “deportations, reconfiguring the state, rooting out woke, reforming the broken elite consensus…” Lovely!

38 Quentin Letts

“I think the problem with writing for a paper like the Daily Mail is you become trapped in unkindness, but cannot see it,” wrote former Sun editor David Yelland after reading Quentin Letts’s sneering hatchet job “tribute” to the late John Prescott. He might be wrong – Letts seems to enjoy this sort of stuff, as witnessed by his unique take on Ed Davey’s moving speech about his family at the Lib Dems’ election launch (“one of the most emotively manipulative pieces of saccharine hucksterism I’ve had thrust down my gullet… Sir Ed wants us to feel sorry for him so he keeps talking about being a carer and having been orphaned as a teenager”).

37 Carole Malone

The ever-predictable newspaper columnist and TV pundit recently told GB News viewers that Rachel Reeves’s budget was “the worst in my lifetime”. But can her judgment really be trusted when two years ago she had assured Daily Express readers that Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-budget, which tanked the economy, had been “a vision that would make this country prosperous again” and that the only people who disagreed were “the armies of the Uniformed on social media” and “the jackals in Truss’s own party”? Malone is fond of calling anyone she dislikes an idiot, leading to this memorable tweet about David Lammy from August: “This is what happens when you have an idiot as foreign secret.”

36 Bloke from Right Said Fred

The two Fairbrass brothers had a couple of hits over 30 years ago, and we are still paying the price for it. An anti-vaxxer who contracted Covid, the Fairbrass who sings is now a staunch supporter of Vladimir Putin. In one of the most bizarre and unsettling scenes in recent British TV history, the boys appeared on Nigel Farage’s GB News show, set in what looked like a mocked-up pub, and performed an unplugged version of I’m Too Sexy for an audience of very confused-looking mostly grey-haired Farageists. The Freds also dismissively tweeted “phone boxes refurbed into defibrillators, what a time to be alive”, appearing to suggest that it is woke to seek treatment for a heart attack.

35 Rupert Lowe

The ruddy-cheeked ex-Southampton chairman turned Reform MP for Great Yarmouth is an anti net-zero campaigner who rails against “the cult of climate change”, but also is a director of heat pump company Alto Energy, a UK supplier of air and ground source heat pumps. Shortly after the general election, it called on the government to “prioritise investments in green technologies like heat pumps”, adding, “moving away from fossil fuel heating systems is crucial for achieving energy independence and net zero targets”. Lowe was humiliated on a recent episode of the BBC’s Politics Live, when his claim that Britain spends the third-most on health in Europe was immediately countered by a graph showing Britain trailing nine other European countries in per capita health spending. “Is this a BBC graph?” asked the floundering Lowe. It wasn’t.

34 Neil Oliver

The former presenter of BBC travelogue show Coast has become a GB News conspiracy theorist whom the channel had to move online to stop a raft of Ofcom complaints and potential fines. Glowering into the camera, Oliver delivers pseudo-nationalist monologues – “The nations of the west are being made to forget who they are, who they were, and that’s no accident” – while peddling anti-vax nonsense. Earlier this year, he was investigated by Ofcom for telling viewers that Covid jabs had caused “turbo cancer”. In a video banned by YouTube, Oliver also interviewed the conspiracy theorist Whitney Webb, who told him that the US and US establishments were being helped to run a “crime syndicate” that was “essentially a meeting of the Italian mafia and the Jewish mob”. He also has appeared several times with his fellow shitlister and completely normal man with a beard, Russell Brand.

33 Victoria Atkins

When The Who’s Pete Townshend wore a union flag jacket on stage in the mid-1960s, it defined mod. When David Bowie and Geri Halliwell respectively wore a union flag coat and union flag dress on the cover of 1997 album Earthling and at the 1997 Brits, it defined Cool Britannia. When shadow environment secretary Atkins wore a union flag jacket at the 2024 farmers’ protests it defined not just cringe but more importantly chutzpah, given how the Conservatives’ Brexit has laid waste to UK farming. 

32 Alex Phillips

The former Brexit Party MEP and GB News presenter, now appearing on the zombie corpse of Rupert Murdoch’s TalkTV, is another one of those on the extreme right who seems to think Donald Trump’s victory is also a win for them. On November 6, Phillips took to X and declared: “You’ve had your time, Woke Globalists. The world is ours now”, a phrase that all Scarface fans will find eerily familiar. Always keen to blather on about the horrors of Britain’s growing crime rates, earlier in November she posted an interview on her own site with, er, Tommy Robinson, the notorious convicted street brawler, jailbird and founder of the English Defence League. Phillips trailed this as an “exclusive”. 

31 Darren Grimes

The right wing provocateur, former Brexit campaigner and occasional GB News host has been part of a giant tantrum on the part of those who did not vote Labour in May, and is currently getting excited about a petition calling for a re-run of the general election, which has attracted 2.4m unchecked signatures (at time of going to press). Grimes naturally opposed a so-called “people’s vote” after Brexit and ridiculed a petition with 6m signatures calling for one. In the summer, Grimes tweeted out AI images of Keir Starmer in a pink hijab, asking “what will Britain look like after five years of Keir Starmer?” The secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain commented, with admirable restraint: “It is unclear how such an Islamophobic perspective from a prominent public face of GB News aligns with the broadcaster’s goal of being perceived as a respectable news outlet.”

30 Michelle Mone

After closing 2023 with ill-advised interviews to “clear her name”, it has been a quiet year for the life peer at the centre of the PPE scandal. That doesn’t mean the country or the National Crime Agency have forgotten. Some £75m in assets once controlled by Mone and her husband, Doug Barrowman, have been frozen, and a business empire that once included 12 companies has been reduced to a single business. But Britain still waits to hear the full details of what happened during the Covid pandemic, when Mone assured the government that she would most definitely not benefit from a vast deal being done by her husband to supply the health service with PPE (personal protective equipment). Five months later, £29m of profits from her husband’s firm were transferred into a trust in the Isle of Man from which Mone actually would benefit. 

29 Douglas Murray

ETHNO-NATIONALIST OF THE YEAR AWARD 2024

The respectable face of ethno-nationalism in Britain, Murray is an enthusiastic promoter of white replacement theory, which holds that white western Europeans are being replaced by Muslims, a viciously nasty theory that he set out at length in The War on the West, a book as nuanced as its title suggests. A columnist for the Spectator, he was shamefully defended by the magazine’s now ex-editor Fraser Nelson after saying of Muslim pro-Gaza protesters: “If the army will not be sent in, then the public will have to go in, and the public will have to sort this out themselves and it’ll be very, very brutal.” Murray’s instinctive tendency towards self-aggrandisement means that – in his mind at least – he now stands as a heroic civilisational bulwark against the advancing forces of global evil. His forthcoming book, On Democracies and Death Cults, will, Murray says, give an account of “the people who step up to defend our societies to the people who want to destroy them”. The irony is that Murray’s brand of feverish, paranoiac nationalism has done more harm to Britain than any “death cult”.

28 Joey Barton

The former footballer, whose love of Nietzsche and Lucian Freud once saw him rewarded with a fawning profile in the Observer, continues his descent into misogyny and other forms of bigotry. Because Barton believes that “women shouldn’t be talking with any kind of authority on the men’s game”, he has compared England international turned pundit Eni Aluko to Rose West, Joseph Stalin and Pol Pot in a series of bullying tweets. He called Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink – then part of Gareth Southgate’s England set-up – a “token black coach” and had to pay Jeremy Vine £75,000 after calling him a “bike nonce” and a “pedo defender” on Twitter. Barton is now such an unpleasant extremist that he has been rewarded with a fawning profile in the Spectator, courtesy of the absurd Brendan O’Neill.

27 Dominic Cummings

Now that he’s out of politics, Dominic Cummings spends a lot of time on X/Twitter, making claims such as that Keir Starmer is “letting MURDERERS out of jail EARLY” to make room for people who say “he KNEW about the Al Qaeda (sic) links in SOUTHPORT”. That’s a reference to a plainly untrue conspiracy theory that Starmer once defended a member of the Southport killer’s family. It’s unnerving to think Cummings was once so influential. A shame that during his days in No 10 he didn’t do practical stuff such as building jails, but spent his time fighting civil servants and briefing about his political enemies to the press. An outcast for now, Cummings seems to sense some kind of vindication in the fact that Donald Trump has brought Elon Musk into his administration, recently tweeting that there is a “lot of chat about DOGE (Musk’s government cost-cutting unit) and resemblance to Vote Leave plans…” Does Musk even know, or care, who he is?

26 Laurence Fox

The former actor turned political provocateur Fox recently commented to the former BBC and LBC radio presenter Sangita Myska on X that: “You are not welcome in my country”. That post was reported to the police – of whom, Fox told his followers on X: “Buy yourself an axe, and greet the pigs at the door with it if they come knocking. The police are your enemy.” It’s an odd thing to say for a man who made his name playing a policeman on ITV. A little bit of self-hate creeping in there perhaps? It’s entirely understandable if so. “London is a dump,” Fox complained recently, calling the capital a “leftist shithole” before adding “thanks for all the diversity Sadiq Khan”. And as for Europe, Fox reckons that the entire continent is “committing suicide” after having “flung open our borders to a conquering religion”, and from the accompanying image, it is clear that he means Islam.

25 David Frost

Booze flogger turned pro-Brexit cakeist, Frost now parps away on the benches of the Lords, where he was installed by Boris Johnson as a permanent monument to the most disgraceful period in modern British politics. Supported Robert Jenrick to win the Tory leadership, which he didn’t. Is now convinced that Trump’s victory somehow also represents a victory for the British right. This, along with his calamitous stint as Britain’s Brexit negotiator, suggests that geopolitics is not his strong point.

24 James Dyson

James Dyson, the West Country inventor, called recent Labour changes to inheritance tax on agricultural land “spiteful”. “Make no mistake,” Dyson wrote in the Times, “the very fabric of our economy is being ripped apart. No business can survive Reeves’s 20% tax grab. It will be the death of entrepreneurship.” It is surely coincidental that Dyson just happens to own hundreds of millions of pounds worth of land, having decided to start buying up farmland in late middle age, around the time when inheritance tax might start to play on a billionaire’s mind. Dyson was also a high-profile Brexiter who advised the government to pursue a hard-Brexit strategy, saying that negotiations with the EU were heading nowhere and that Britain “should just walk away and they will come to us”. Fortunately no one listened to him. After Brexit, Dyson promptly moved a substantial part of his operation to the far east.

23 David Black

Black joined the UK water regulator Ofwat in 2012, became chief regulation officer, and was made CEO in 2021. In the course of a career spent overseeing the nation’s water companies, our rivers and coastal waters have been inundated with shit. Formerly an adviser on financial economics for the energy sector, Black was perhaps not the ideal candidate to protect the waterways. The nightmarish state of our rivers is proof of what a disastrous choice he was. Black has said he “completely disagreed” with assessments that Ofwat – which now faces being scrapped in a government review of the industry – was somehow failing. Remarkable.

22 Huw Edwards

The BBC presenter was nailed on for national treasure status, but turned out to be a stone-cold perv and was convicted on three counts of “making indecent images of children”. The man whose voice once ushered the country through the most momentous events of British public life is now on the sex offenders’ register for viewing images that, the court found, included “a child aged approximately 7-9 years”. 

21 Allister Heath

WINNER, DELUSIONAL COLUMNIST OF THE YEAR

The depths of Heath’s weirdness are really quite hard to convey. Editor of the Sunday Telegraph, the best way to appreciate his strange combination of paranoia and bombast is to flick through the headlines of his Telegraph columns. Take, for example, “We are the West’s last generation before the new Dark Age begins”. Or how about, “Western civilisation is being driven to oblivion by the false prophets of ‘diversity’.” Another belter was, “For the first time in my life, I’m now beginning to think Britain is finished”, not to mention “Starmer’s brand of politics is dying – Clarkson could deliver the fatal blow”. No wonder he is known in Telegraph Towers as “Chicken Little”. That someone so very odd has such a prominent perch from which to spout this arrant nonsense is, more than anything, a sign of the steep decline of the Telegraph. It is notable that, in the fire sale of the Telegraph Group’s assets the Spectator was snapped up, but as yet, no one wants the newspapers. Publishing cretinous screeds of the sort in which Heath specialises has done the brand no good whatsoever.

20 Katie Hopkins

The far right provocateur and former Apprentice contestant has rebranded herself as a comedian, although her material suggests that may be wide of the mark. At a recent gig she is said to have described the Grenfell Tower fire as “saddy saddy, burny burny”, while at another she spotted Sky News’s Tom Cheshire and told the audience “I smell a virgin… I smell lefty, pressy scum!” At least it makes a change from her rants about Muslims; she once remarked that “Islam disgusts me”, has referred to Sadiq Khan as “the Muslim mayor of Londonistan” and has promoted the idea of “anti-white racism” and the “white genocide conspiracy theory”. Calling herself “the Jesus of the outspoken”, Hatie now plans to “perform a show” next year at a Scottish golf club. And the owner of that golf club – why, Donald Trump of course.

19 Morrissey

“You cannot speak freely in England, you’ll be sent to prison,” the former Smiths singer told a New Jersey crowd in November, revealing himself to be either a) a surprise fan of comedian Stewart “these days” Lee or b) a complete idiot. “As you know, nobody will release my music any more,” he continued, “because I’m a chief exponent of free speech. In England at least, it’s now criminalised.” It could also be that no record companies will release his current music because they have heard it. The song Bonfire of Teenagers, which Morrissey says is being repressed because it deals with the Manchester Arena bombing, features the line “Oh, you should’ve seen her leave for the arena/Only to be vapourised” and the refrain “Go easy on the killer”. It’s every bit as good as it sounds.

18 Owen JonesWINNER, MEDIA DISASTER AREA OF THE YEAR

“I’m going back to my hotel in New York”, Jones tweeted during his US election tour of the states. “With a Muslim Pakistani American cab driver… who voted for Donald Trump”. It’s a mark of Jones’s politics that he sees people as being members of such strictly drawn categories, even though he is someone whose entire journalistic character is against the idea of pigeonholing people based on their race or identity. Though a Guardian columnist, Jones spends a lot of his time making YouTube videos of himself arguing with people. Recently, almost all of those videos have been concerned with Israel. It is remarkable that Jones, generally regarded as a UK political commentator and activist, concentrates so relentlessly and exclusively on the Gaza war. The problem with Jones is that he has become the very thing he thinks he opposes. He would tell you he’s a freedom-fighting pursuer of truth and supporter of the oppressed. But really he’s just another ranting extremist with a mic and a handheld camera – the Glenn Beck of the left.

17 Richard Tice

Being Nigel Farage’s deputy in the Reform Party makes Richard Tice one of the biggest number twos in British politics. Tice is a contradictory figure – a climate crisis denier who drives an electric car and a man who put millions of pounds worth of shares in his property empire in an offshore trust and then authorised a Reform manifesto that pledged to “take back control” of “our money” and “stop the offshore taxpayer ripoff”. Tice is so fond of his flowing barnet that he is nicknamed The Hairdresser, which might explain his belief that “lots of these new barber shops… are fronts for money laundering and drug money”. Or perhaps that is just his standard dogwhistling; Tice has said Labour are “ruining our culture” and that immigration has made Britain “poorer culturally”.

16 Boris Johnson

The partygate liar was back in the news recently, to accuse Keir Starmer of “effectively standing with Hamas” by supporting the International Criminal Court’s warrant for the arrest of Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes. In typical style, Johnson failed to mention that the same terms of arrest also applied to, er, the Hamas leader Mohammed Deif. The former PM’s slipperiness has not been missed, as evidenced by the poor reception his autobiography, Unleashed, has received. Despite a colossal marketing drive (including a disastrous interview in French, which showed that he can’t speak French), the book was a flop, selling just 42,000 copies in its first week (for context, Tony Blair’s autobiography launched with sales of 92,000 and Margaret Thatcher’s 120,000). Of course, the man who gets away with almost everything won’t be financially damaged by this disaster – he has already trousered a £2m advance. 

15 Frank Hester

The software entrepreneur who has given at least £20m of his estimated £370m fortune to the Tory Party since 2023 managed to hasten and worsen its electoral demise once his comments about Diane Abbott became known in March. Hester apologised for commenting in a work meeting that the Labour MP would “make you want to hate all black women” and that “she should be shot”. A statement from Hester’s lawyers said the comments “had been distorted and taken out of context”. In June, new reports said Hester was alleged to have referred to one of his staff members as the “token Muslim”, to have imitated people of Chinese descent and to have remarked that one individual was attractive for a black woman. None of this was judged bad enough for the Conservatives to actually return any of his money; in fact they accepted another £5m from him days after the general election was called.

14 Justin Welby

Welby recently stood down as archbishop of Canterbury after it turned out he’d been told in 2013 about a serial child abuser in the church named John Smyth, but had failed to do anything about it. A report into Smyth’s activities and the church’s reaction found it was “unlikely” that Welby didn’t know what was going on. The facts were hideous: Smyth carried out “traumatic physical, sexual, psychological and spiritual attacks” on more than 100 boys over four decades. He died in 2018. Having resigned his post, Welby – or to give him his proper name “Justindenial” – showed the depth of his contrition by, er, heading out for a swanky dinner at the British Museum’s annual trustees dinner. Ian Hislop, the editor of Private Eye, was at the event, and wasn’t having any of it. When Welby came over and said “isn’t this lovely?” Hislop replied, “it’s lovely you’ve resigned”. Hear hear.

13 Paul Marshall

In March, when the right wing media magnate was revealed to have liked and shared several extremist, Islamophobic and conspiracy theorist quotes, Michael Gove was asked to condemn Marshall in the Commons. Gove replied that he deplored this attack on a “distinguished philanthropist”. He is now editor of the Spectator, which Marshall bought in September. Yet another public school-educated, City-boy Europhobe who wanted to get his hands into the nation’s guts, Marshall was the founder of UnHerd, a strange combination of worthwhile journalism and swivel-eyed, extremist nationalistic ranting. That kind of delusional, paranoid stuff also crops up regularly on GB News, the wildly unpleasant TV cable “news” channel that is bankrolled by Marshall – an unusual outlet to be owned by someone who is reportedly a committed “conservative christian”. Perhaps the Spectator, which cost him £100m, will convey a more compassionate message to its audience.

12 Isabel Oakeshott

The journalist and partner of Reform’s Richard Tice, Oakeshott appeared on TalkTV back in October to make some nod-and-a-wink remarks about “Keir Starmer’s private life”. The rumours, she said, “certainly aren’t to do with any doubts around his sexuality, if I can put it delicately. And it wouldn’t be fair to go any further than that.” And that really tells you all you need to know about Oakeshott – that she has an instinct for debasement. She was, after all, the journalist who co-wrote the story about David Cameron performing a sex act with a dead pig. That story turned out to be untrue. Oakeshott still regards herself as a respectable hack, but the gap between how she sees herself and what she really is seems to be growing ever wider. In one memorable Twitter exchange, Oakeshott said: “I grew up in Scotland. I trained as a tabloid reporter in Glasgow. Don’t tell me what tough looks like.” To which a Twitter user replied, correctly: “You went to the same school as the fucking king”.

11 Allison Pearson

The absurd over-reaction that followed the visit to the Daily Telegraph columnist by Essex police shows not only her employer’s descent into culture war hysteria, but also the pomposity of the queen of overween. It was a “‘Kafkaesque’ hate crime inquiry”, said the Telegraph, leading to a “week of hell (that) shows that the Britain we love and trust is gone”, said Pearson. In reality, someone had complained to police about a tweet from Pearson that claimed two men of colour pictured holding what she took to be a Hamas flag were “Jew haters”. In fact they were holding the flag of a Pakistani political party. Pearson wailed that she had deleted the tweet and that this was a simple issue of free speech. She may have had a point, but she was quickly threatening those who questioned her account of the affair with legal action. Refusing to appear on The News Agents podcast, she told them “if you get any aspect of the story wrong my lawyers will be watching”. So much for free speech.

10 Robert Jenrick

More than any other contender in the Tory leadership race, children’s mural remover Jenrick was willing to slather himself in the ordure of the culture war. During the contest, Jenrick wrote a column in the Daily Mail, in which he whanged on about “unprecedented migration, the dismantling of our national culture, non-integrating multiculturalism and the denigration of our identity”, showing himself to be little more than a tin-pot populist suffering from an acute case of early-onset authoritarianism. Jenrick also called for Britain to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, which would have torpedoed the Good Friday Agreement and made Britain an international pariah, joining only Russia and Belarus as European countries outside the ECHR. He lost to Kemi Badenoch, provoking eye-rolls from his wife – but “Bobby J” hasn’t gone away. If only he would.

9 Robbie Gibb

The former Conservative comms chief, who describes himself as a “Thatcherite” and who once did a stint advising GB News, was installed on the BBC’s board after a Tory campaign to get him in there by Conservative advisers. Once in situ, the man who wrote in 2020 that the BBC had been “culturally captured by the woke-dominated groupthink of some of its own staff” started trying to drag the BBC over to the right. Though some dispute that Gibb is as powerful as his critics say, there are claims of him monitoring journalists’ social media posts for political bias and for sending aggressive memos about their content. Lewis Goodall, the former Newsnight journo turned podcaster, says he was told by his editors, “be careful: Robbie is watching you”. The result was the creation of a culture of fear at the BBC, in which journalists were afraid to report negative stories about the Tory government, an act of colossal media vandalism. In March, he was given another four-year term in which to remake the BBC to his own liking.

8 Kemi Badenoch

The new Conservative leader was elected for being marginally less useless than Robert Jenrick, although she almost torpedoed her own campaign by saying maternity pay was “excessive” and had “gone too far”. Overwhelmed with a misguided sense of her own brilliance, she has been a hectoring dud at PMQs so far while continuing to toss out idiotic half-formed thoughts – that partygate was “overblown”, that “not all cultures are equally valid”, that autistic people receive “better treatment” than the rest of us, including “economic privileges and protections”, that 5% to 10% of civil servants are so bad that they should be in prison, and that she became working class by getting a part-time job at McDonald’s.

7 Jeremy Clarkson

Clarkson, who has reinvented himself as a farmer, turned up to the recent London protests and became angry when Victoria Derbyshire quizzed him about his motivations for opposing the changes in the tax rules, suggesting that he’d only ever bought his farm to avoid inheritance tax. “Typical BBC,” harrumphed Clarkson, explaining that he had actually bought the farm because he wanted to shoot. That will come as a surprise to readers of Hello! Back in 2021, Clarkson told the magazine: “I’ve actually lived on the farm for many years, we had it for all sorts of inheritance tax reasons.” And in 2010 Clarkson also discussed his reasons for buying the farm, saying:  “I have bought a farm. There are many sensible reasons for this. Land is a better investment than any bank can offer. The government doesn’t get any of my money when I die.” Clarkson, who left Top Gear after punching and verbally abusing a producer who dared to tell him there was no hot food available at their hotel, famously once wrote of Meghan, Duchess of Sussex that “I hate her,” and that he dreamed of the day “when she is made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds chant, ‘Shame!’ and throw lumps of excrement at her”. This was too dodgy even for the Sun, which apologised.

6 Liz Truss

WINNER, LACK OF SELF-AWARENESS AWARD

The former PM whose idiotic policies sent the UK economy into such a tailspin that she ended up having the shortest tenure in No 10 history still thought people would want to hear her views on Rachel Reeves’s first budget (“This is just the start of the pain… it’s going to be a very painful day,” she said, to mass ridicule). Truss has now re-invented herself as a member of the globetrotting commentariat. Most of her efforts seem to be aimed at attracting the attention of the US right, who seem ignorant of her disastrous time in Downing Street. Earlier this year, while hawking her new book, Ten Years to Save the West, she spoke to a half-empty room at a conservative convention in Maryland and recently told a meeting in Delhi, “frankly I think we need a British Trump”. Having destroyed her reputation here, she’s desperately trying to hop on the Trump bandwagon. If she can wreak as much havoc in the US right as she did to the Tories over here, well – you go right ahead, Liz.

5 Lee Anderson

The hugely self-satisfied Reform MP’s claims to being a man who stands up for ordinary people were undermined when he was forced to apologise to the House of Commons for bullying a parliamentary security guard who asked to see his pass. Anderson, who pockets £100,000 per year for a GB News show, told him, “Fuck off, everyone opens the door to me” and “fuck you, I have a train to catch”. He recently took to Twitter to suggest that the 23% of voters who still approve of Keir Starmer are “probably the same people living free of charge in our hotels and prisons”. With his “we want our country back” dogwhistling, his allegations of “two-tier policing” and his anti-woke campaigns – “30p Lee” announced a personal boycott of Nike over a rainbow flag on England shirts, then was seen wearing one of the sports giant’s baseball caps – he makes you nostalgic for the likes of Jonathan Gullis. 

4 Russell Brand

WINNER, HOLY SHIT OF THE YEAR AWARD

An investigation by Channel 4 and the Sunday Times set out accusations made by four women against Brand of rape and sexual assault. Police have recently passed a further file of accusations against him to the Crown Prosecution Service to consider whether charges are appropriate. Brand denies all wrongdoing. Since all that first came out, Brand has reinvented himself by throwng off his motor-mouth guttersnipe schtick to become a born-again Christian and champion of swivel-eyed conspiracy theories. That has brought him to the attention of other outcasts, including Tucker Carlson, the US bow tie-wearing former Fox News presenter turned nationalist Trumpy loon. The two have appeared on stage together at weirdo rallies in the US. They’re welcome to him.

3 Paula Vennells

“One of my reflections on all of this is that I was too trusting,” said Paula Vennells in May, a jaw-dropping assessment of her part as CEO of the Post Office during the Horizon scandal, the biggest miscarriage of justice in British legal history, when around 900 sub-postmasters were wrongly convicted of having their hands in the till. Many were sent to jail, and even more were forced to make payments out of their own pocket to make up for apparent shortfalls, when all along the problem was a glitchy computer system. The Post Office, under Vennells, fought against a group action brought by the wrongly accused, spending £100m of public money. It eventually took a TV drama, Mr Bates vs the Post Office, to blow the scandal wide open, and in internal PO communications, later made public, Vennells told her subordinates that their priority should be to “manage the media”. She insists that in a dozen years at the Post Office, seven of them as chief executive, she was never aware of any wrongdoing.

2 Tommy Robinson

OSWALD FAUX-LY AWARD FOR SERVICES TO FASCISM

Despite declaring himself bankrupt in 2021, far right activist Tommy Robinson – real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – seems to have a lavish lifestyle. His social media feeds show him in pricey restaurants, villas and hotels across Europe, and last July he tweeted his take on the riots from a £400-a-night, five-star hotel in Ayia Napa, Cyprus. “People need to rise up,” he wrote, adding that there were “mass deportations needed”. His high life is currently on hold, with the English Defence League founder back in jail, serving 18 months for contempt of court after repeating false allegations against a Syrian refugee, in breach of an injunction. Prison really is the best place for him. In 2005 he was jailed for kicking a police officer in the head. In 2011 he was convicted of assault, and convicted again for starting a 100-man brawl at a football match. He was charged with mortgage fraud in 2012, jailed in 2013 for trying to enter the US using a fake passport, convicted of contempt of court in 2017 and jailed again in 2018.

1 Nigel Farage

WINNER

SHIT OF THE YEAR 2024

The MP for Clacton remains one of the most disingenuous, idiotic and persistent figures in British public life. Having finally won a Commons seat at the last general election, the leader of the Reform Party decided that the best way to serve the people of the Essex seaside resort was to bugger off to the States to support Donald Trump in his bid to get back into the White House. He should have stayed there; instead Farage’s ill-considered, nudge-nudge video implying police were withholding the truth about the Southport tragedy helped to cause days of lawlessness. 

Farage continues to burble darkly about “two-tier policing” and other conspiracy theories, while tossing out untruths such as his claim to have been banned by the Speaker’s Office from conducting MP surgeries in Clacton. Most recently, the former public schoolboy and City trader attached himself to the farmers’ protests over the government’s inheritance tax changes, appearing at the Whitehall demonstrations in cosplay Archers gear – Barbour, startling banana-yellow trousers and a pair of wellies so immaculately clean that they’d obviously never been anywhere near a farm. The fancy umbrella draped across one arm in the style of the classic City spiv rather gave the game away. Asked at the protests whether Brexit had worsened farmers’ lot, he offered only lame jokes about bum steers. The author of the most damaging political event in British public life since Suez, and owner of the most offensive pair of trousers ever seen in Whitehall, is a worthy winner of this year’s Shit of the Year award.