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The year in politics

From Emily Thornberry's demise to Nigel Farage's relentless rise, 2014 has seen politicians battle for the lime (and low) light like never before. Click between the tabs on the left and scroll down to see our list of the best and worst politicians of 2014.


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    • Annus mirabilis
    • Annus horribilis
  • Nigel Farage

    Any leader whose party wins a national election can’t have had a bad year, but for a party that started the year without a single MP and finished fourth place at the last general election, Ukip’s triumph in the European parliamentary elections marked a new high for Nigel Farage. The party won 27 per cent of the vote and became the biggest UK party in the European parliament with 24 seats.

    “The Ukip fox is in the Westminster hen house”, he exclaimed after the party gained more than 150 council seats in local elections on the same day. A projected national share of the vote suggested Ukip would have won 17 per cent of the vote in a general election, a level they have consistently scored in polling ever since and a far cry from the 3 per cent of votes they won in 2010.

    A few months later the “Ukip fox” broke into the House of Commons as Douglas Carswell, followed swiftly by Mark Reckless, defected from the Conservatives to Ukip and won two by-elections to give the party its first elected MPs.

    It wasn’t all plain sailing for Mr Farage however, with countless stories in the media over alleged false expense claims, sex scandals, harassment claims, financial troubles and allegations of corruption in candidate selection contests, but the revelations failed to stick and only reinforced the Ukip leader’s image as the “Teflon” politician. His immunity from negative coverage spurred Winston McKenzie, the party’s colourful Commonwealth spokesman famed for having stood for every major political party but never winning an election, to compare Mr Farage to Jesus who can “do no wrong”. “Jesus was one man, we’re his army. Farage is one man, and we’re his army and that’s what it’s all about,” Mr McKenzie said.

    “Farage is like (non-stick) Teflon – he can do no wrong. Everywhere he goes, it doesn’t matter what he says or does - he gets away with it.”

    Even a number of gaffes by Mr Farage himself over the past year have failed to damage his or his party’s reputation in the polls. He has suggested the UK should join an exclusive list of countries in barring people with Aids from entering the country; he said he would feel “uncomfortable” if a group of Romanians moved next door and he blamed high levels of immigration for missing a Ukip fundraising event. Ukip is taking votes off all three main parties. Although they are threatening even strong Labour thresholds - as the Heywood and Middleton by-election demonstrated - the bulk of Ukip’s success in 2015 will come at the expense of the Tories. And he has already scored a direct victory over Mr Cameron by knocking the prime minister off the top of the list of most influential figures on the right.

  • Alex Salmond

    They may have lost the Scottish referendum but many see Alex Salmond and the SNP as the real victors. In July 2012, two years before Scots voted on whether to break away from the UK, Mr Salmond said that devolving all financial matters to the Scottish parliament in Holyrood was “a very attractive argument” and that this option would in fact be better for Scotland than full independence, at least in the short term.

    He campaigned hard to include a devo-max option on the ballot paper in a three-way referendum question, but David Cameron resisted and succeeded in securing a single question on the ballot paper. Such was the surge in the polls towards independence however, that all three main Westminster parties, faced with the Armageddon prospect of losing Scotland, were forced to pledge a form of devo-max in the event of a “no” vote. And just two months after the referendum, the cross-party Smith Commission presented its recommendation on further devolution, proposing the transfer of wide-ranging tax powers to Holyrood.

    Mr Salmond, who announced that he would stand down as Scottish first minister within minutes of losing the referendum, has voiced concerns over whether the full range of powers will be delivered. Far from mirroring his rivals in the Better Together campaign - Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown have both announced they are quitting as MPs in May - Mr Salmond dramatically announced his intention to return to Westminster to ensure that devo-max is fulfilled. He added that he was “not ruling out” the prospect of accepting a cabinet position in a Labour-led coalition, an outcome that would move him even closer to realising his dream of Scottish independence.

    It is not only the significant powers flowing north of the border that are a measure of his success this year, but the remarkable growth of the SNP and pro-independence support since the referendum. The SNP’s membership has more than trebled to 90,000 since September’s vote and the latest YouGov poll showed that if the independence referendum were run again, the Yes campaign would win with 52 per cent in favour of breaking away and 48 per cent against.

    History books could have marked 2014 as the year of Alex Salmond had Scots voted for independence, but nonetheless it has been a remarkable year for the Scot, conveniently born on Hogmanay. And despite turning 60 this month, there will undoubtedly be further chapters to write in Salmond’s relentless fight for Scottish nationalism.

  • George Osborne

    George Osborne is the man who deserves credit more than most for bringing growth back to Britain, but for much of the parliament it appeared as though the chancellor’s stubbornness not to shift from his “plan A” of austerity would lead to a short-lived political career. Midway through the parliament it was still unclear whether Mr Osborne would even survive in his key position attempting to steer the UK out of recession. Resisting calls for any diversion from his plan A , his “omnishambles” budget in 2012 was followed by personal humiliation when he was booed by 80,000 spectators at the Olympics. Even as recently as February 2013 austerity appeared to be failing. One more quarter of negative growth would have plunged Britain into an unprecedented triple-dip recession, which could well have been fatal for Mr Osborne. His portly appearance, not helped by tweeting pictures of him eating take-away burgers at work in the Treasury, did nothing to help his standing with cash-strapped voters.

    By the end of 2014, however, his rehabilitation - both in terms of his standing with the public and his physical appearance - was complete. The chancellor has won the debate on the economy and is now presiding over low-inflation economic growth. The battle has moved on to future deficit-reduction plans and although the autumn statement, with the Office for Budget Responsibility’s forecast of government spending under a future Tory government falling to 1930 levels, gave Labour something to pounce on, Osborne has succeeded in shifting the debate on to the future management of the economy, where he enjoys a significant lead over his rivals.

    One of the bizarre phenomena about Mr Osborne is why he isn’t more unpopular. It is evidence of his success that a man who has presided over around £60 billion of spending cuts ranks so highly among voters. He enjoys a strong lead over the question of trust on running the economy - the latest YouGov poll showed 42 per cent trusted Mr Osborne and Mr Cameron to run the economy against just 26 per cent for Ed Miliband and Ed Balls. His radical reforms to pensions and stamp duty and tax cuts for the middle classes have boosted his standing with Conservative voters and it is a sign of his transformation that he is now being spoken of as a future leader of the party. In the latest survey of party members for the ConservativeHome website, Mr Osborne finished third in the list of future leaders, behind Theresa May and Boris Johnson.

    Mr Cameron’s wide-ranging reshuffle in the summer tightened the chancellor’s grip on the government and party hierarchy, with a host of his acolytes promoted to key positions and well placed if Mr Osborne decides to make a move in the event of a vacancy at the top. Nicky Morgan and Sajid Javid, who both served in his Treasury team, were promoted to the cabinet, while Matthew Hancock’s wide remit of government duties was strengthened and he was given a seat around the cabinet table too. Mr Osborne only sanctioned the axing of Michael Gove when presented with the former education secretary’s abysmal polling but Mr Gove, a strong advocate of the chancellor as a future leader, is now in a very strong position as chief whip with Greg Hands, yet another Osborne ally, as his deputy.

    A 5:2 diet and regular jogs around St James’s Park have mirrored the transformation in his reputation as chancellor, with commentators praising him for looking “more like a slick CEO than a slack chancellor” and he ends 2014 having wedged himself into the race for the future leadership of the party,

  • Steve Webb

    PA

    Steve Webb will go down in the history books as the man who gave pensioners the freedom to splash their hard-earned savings on Lamborghinis. The Lib Dem pensions minister made one of government’s more boring portfolios sexy in 2014 by overseeing the biggest pensions revolution in a century. From April 2015, savers will be able to use their pension pots however they please once they reach retirement age, rather than being forced to draw on an annual income, while the 55 per cent tax rate imposed on those who take out more than a quarter of the savings in their pension pot will be cut to the marginal rate of tax.

    The changes led Mr Webb to say he wasn’t “bothered” about how pensioners chose to take advantage of the relaxed rules, even if it meant them blowing all their savings on £100,000 Italian sports cars. "If people do get a Lamborghini, and end up on the state pension, the state is much less concerned about that, and that is their choice,” said the man who relaxes on holiday by filling in complicated number puzzles. It’s a sign of his success that not only is he the longest-serving pensions minister since records began, but this also comes after a period in which the job switched hands ten times in as many years.

    This year has been the climax of four years of revolution in pensions. Mr Webb has won plenty of admirers in Westminster and among the older generations across the country for introducing the flat-rate state pension, the “triple lock”, which ensures pensions rise by at least 2.5 per cent a year, and a new law requiring employers to auto-enrol staff on to pension schemes. Perhaps Mr Webb was driven by a determination to prove his leader wrong - Nick Clegg was once overheard remarking that Mr Webb was “a problem … we need someone with good ideas and his just don’t add up”. Perhaps he has much grander ambitions of leading the party in the future or maybe he was simply motivated to make more friends: “Pensions have suddenly become sexy; people want to sit next to me at dinner now,” he revealed recently.

  • Jim Murphy

    Getty Images

    Travelling around the streets of 100 Scottish towns making speeches atop an upturned Irn-Bru crate is not the most modern way of fighting a referendum, but this unconventional approach propelled Jim Murphy into the media spotlight as he quite literally took the fight over his country’s future to the streets. In the face of constant abuse and heckling, along with the odd egg thrown in for good measure, the 47-year-old Labour Glaswegian fought relentlessly against Scottish nationalists and won much admiration and credit for his role in persuading Scots to reject independence by a much higher margin than the final polls were predicting.

    His battle didn’t stop there however. When Johann Lamont quit as leader of the beleaguered Scottish Labour party in October, Mr Murphy, a Blairite, threw his name in the hat to fight the ensuing leadership contest, which pitted him against the union-backed left-winger Neil Findlay. Again Mr Murphy emerged victorious in the face of strong-handed tactics and vicious rhetoric. Len McCluskey, the leader of Unite, Scotland’s biggest trade union, said a win for Mr Murphy would make it “hideously difficult” for Labour to win a majority government at Westminster.

    Mr Murphy overcame many hurdles in 2014, a year after being removed from his role as shadow defence secretary, but his biggest is yet to come.

    With polls showing Labour could be set to lose all but five of its 41 Westminster seats, with polls putting the party as low as 23 per cent, Mr Murphy will require countless numbers of Irn-Bru crates to re-energise the party. And the teetotal vegan, hardly the best traits to represent the Scots, might need something stronger come next May.

    And in a sign of how tough the road ahead is for Mr Murphy and his party north of the border, the devout Catholic has cancelled Christmas for all his staff because they need all the time and resources they can muster for the fight ahead.

  • Brooks Newmark

    Philippe Hays-REX

    When you’re in charge of the campaign to boost female representation in the Conservative party, sending pictures of your penis to a young female party activist called Sophie is not the wisest of moves. When that female researcher turns out to be a male journalist, the selfies involve you wearing paisley pyjamas, and the pictures emerge on the front of a Sunday newspaper on the first day of the Conservative party conference, things take a turn for the worse.

    It was an old-style sting by a freelance journalist and it cost Mr Newmark his three month-old job in government as the minister for civil society and his role chairing the Tory party’s Women2Win group. Any suggestions that his behaviour was a one-off were short-lived as reports in the following Sunday’s newspapers revealed that he had cheated on his wife for two years, leading Mr Newmark to spare his party any further pain by announcing that he would stand down and try and repair his family life.

    “It’s as though somebody drilled a hole in your head and mentally raped you,” was Mr Newmark’s analysis of his state of mind at the time.

    “That’s what it felt like, someone raping your mind because things you thought were private were no longer private, that is the emotional trauma one feels.”

    The biggest winner of the whole affair turned out not to be Ukip, Labour, or even the journalist. No, Marks & Spencer sold out of paisley pyjamas on the same day as the scandal broke. Even if it wasn’t a coincidence, the odds are stacked against Mr Newmark becoming an M&S model come May 2015, when Mr Newmark will be looking for a new job.

  • Andrew Mitchell

    When your legal advisers are telling you that you have an 80 per cent chance of winning a libel case, you’re tempted to take a punt. But that gamble could cost Andrew Mitchell up to £3 million in legal costs and has certainly cost him his political career.

    What was originally a 45-second argument with police turned into a political scandal that earned itself a “gate” suffix. It all started in September 2012, when Mr Mitchell, then the government chief whip, was stopped from cycling through the gates of Downing Street by a police officer, who claimed the politician swore at him and called him and his colleagues “plebs”. Mr Mitchell, who admitted using bad language but denied using the word pleb, lost his job over the whole affair and went on to sue The Sun for libel, while Toby Roland, the police officer, in turn sued Mr Mitchell for libel over comments he made to the media about him.

    The two-year affair finally came to a climax in November 2014 after a judge ruled that Mr Mitchell probably had called officers plebs and ordered him to pay costs.

    Not only did the spat pile immense personal difficulties on Mr Mitchell, it also damaged the Conservative party, doing nothing to help it shed its perception as the nasty party.

    The past 12 months could have been so much sweeter for Mr Mitchell. Had he dropped his libel claims, a return to government would surely have ensued in Mr Cameron’s wide-ranging cabinet reshuffle in the summer, if not before. He could now be putting his feet up for Christmas and looking forward to a promising political career. He won much praise for his work as international development secretary and grander cabinet positions would certainly have been in his sights.

    However, as so often happens with gambling, Mr Mitchell will forever have to stew over the “what-ifs” of 2014.

    He remains determined to continue however, and is understood to be taking comfort from a precedent set by Cecil Parkinson, the Tory minister who quit over a sex scandal in the 1980s but was re-elected and saw his political career rehabilitated. However a sex scandal is very different from a very bitter and public spat with the police, and now that a judge has ruled against him, pointing to inconsistencies in his account, Mr Mitchell will find it impossible to possess the authority necessary to hold government office.

  • Michael Gove

    Getting stuck in the toilet is not the best way for anyone to start a new job. When it comes days after being demoted from overseeing one of the government’s flagship programmes of reforms and led to the Conservatives losing the first vote under his stewardship, things could not have got much worse for Mr Gove. “He hasn’t had the most auspicious of starts”, remarked Angela Eagle, Labour’s shadow leader of the House who revealed Mr Gove’s humiliating mishap. However according to William Hague, who also lost his job as foreign secretary in the reshuffle, acquainting yourself with the lobby toilets outside the chamber is an important brief of a government chief whip.

    “Knowledge of who is in the toilets in whatever lobby is a very important piece of information for any chief whip,” Mr Hague said in the face of raucous Labour MPs on the opposite benches. "I take this as evidence he was carrying out his duties very assiduously."

    Clearly Mr Gove was still in a state of shock after the prime minister decided to axe him as education secretary. Not only did he lose his full cabinet-member salary of £36,000, he was also moved aside to take the sting out of the government’s controversial school reforms in a bid to appease angry teachers and the education “blob” in the lead-up to the election. Did Mr Gove feel any sense of betrayal at all? Absolutely not - he’d do anything to please his master, or so he said on the Radio 4 Today programme the morning after he was axed.

    "Demotion, emotion, promotion, locomotion: I don't know how you would describe this move, though move it is; all I would say is that it's a privilege to serve."

    After a year that also featured high-profile fallouts with the Home Office over radicalisation in schools and repeatedly angering Nick Clegg by opposing his plan for universal free school meals for infants, Mr Gove will be looking forward to starting afresh in 2015. The new year may well feature several enforced new year’s resolutions for Mr Gove back at home, after his wife, the Daily Mail columnist Sarah Vine, revealed a host of irritating habits that her husband has acquired. If enforced, no longer will the government chief whip be able to leave half-smoked cigars on the edge of the bath, empty cartons of milk in the fridge or flush tea bags down the loo.

  • Emily Thornberry

    Until she tweeted a picture of three St George’s flags and a white van, Emily Thornberry was on course to become a leading player in a future Labour government. It was a perfect lesson of how quickly a political career can collapse at the touch of a button in today’s Twitter-obsessed news cycle. Accompanied by the words “image from Rochester”, her tweet managed to distract attention away from another damaging by-election defeat for the Tories at the hands of Ukip into yet more negative coverage for Labour.

    An embattled Mr Miliband, who had battled through weeks of questions over his leadership, hauled Ms Thornberry into his office to demand she apologise, which she duly did, but attached the fatal remarks that she found the sight of the house “remarkable” and something she’d never seen before. Mr Miliband, who was reported to have “never been so angry”, then showed a rare ruthless streak by deciding to sack her in a desperate bid to kill the story. It was in stark contrast to the way he sacked Diane Abbott - who recently revealed that Mr Miliband sought her advice over his decision to fire her.

    In an age when politicians are constantly attacked for being out of touch with the public, the tweet, which was sprawled across the next day’s front pages, did nothing to shore up Labour’s endangered support with the working class, particularly considering Ms Thornberry’s Islington constituency is synonymous with “champagne socialism” and New Labour.

    To be fair to Ms Thornberry, it was the perfect use of Twitter: why waste 240 characters when a picture paints a thousand words? But going down in Twitter history was not something she went into politics for, presumably, and the former attorney-general has a very steep mountain to climb if she wants to clamber into any future government.

  • Nigel Mills

    News Group Newspapers Ltd

    Everyone has found themselves answering emails, texts or checking the latest weather on their phones or tablets during work meetings. Many have even played the odd game of snake to pass the time during a dull meeting. But when you’re an elected politician in an era of apathy and hatred towards your profession, being caught playing a game called Candy Crush on your iPad for more than two hours during a committee meeting is not the wisest move. Yes, that’s right, a 39-year-old man was switching pieces of brightly coloured candy around on his iPad screen when he should have been listening to the government’s latest pension reforms.

    A public outcry ensued, with matters made worse by the revelation that the iPad was paid for by the taxpayer, fuelling calls for school-style bans on certain applications.

    Far from pledging never to be distracted from his publicly funded job by playing a kids’ game again, Mr Mills simply said he would “try not to do it again in future”. He may not get too many more opportunities because he is odds-on to lose his Derbyshire seat to Labour in May, and his slender 536-majority in Amber Valley is even more in danger following “candygate”.

    “There was a bit of the meeting that I wasn’t focusing on and I probably had a game or two,” Mr Mills said in a defence lacking any hint of conviction.

    “I shouldn’t do it but if you check the meeting I would say I was fully engaged in asking questions that I thought were particularly important in how we get the pensions issue right.”

    Remarkably, House of Commons authorities launched an investigation not into Mr Mills’s behaviour, but into who breached Commons rules by photographing the MP playing the game in the first place.