Not that long ago, George Osborne dared to dream that he would be Prime Minister by now. It didn’t come to pass, as we know, so he’ll have to settle for a striking victory in the Scrap of the Year stakes in ConservativeHome’s end-of-year awards.
Even for the habitually combative world of British politics, it’s a been a year for political fisticuffs, so it was hard to choose the shortlist for this one. In addition to our shortlist, readers used the ‘Other’ category to variously nominate ‘Jeremy Corbyn versus the Labour Party’, ‘Fiona Hill versus everyone’ and ‘Davis versus Barnier’.
The clear winner, however, is the former-Chancellor-turned-Evening-Standard-Editor’s vendetta against the Prime Minister, with an outright majority of the 995 votes cast by Party members. He might have apologised for reportedly saying that he wanted May ‘chopped up in bags in my freezer’, but that doesn’t appear to have dented his dominance in this category.