Latest leaderboards for the Ottewell Awards…

Gordon Brown takes over the lead, which is probably to be expected. His mentions of ‘Obama’ this week included this: “Next week, President Karzai of Afghanistan and President Zardari of Pakistan will go together to Washington for a meeting with President Bush… [Shouts of 'Obama' from the backbenches] …Yes, I apologise – with President Obama…”

Really, the only two trigger words that seem to get used are ‘beer’ and ‘football’ – but they get used an awful lot. John Grogan – chairman of the all-party beer group – managed to use the word ‘beer’ a dozen times in a debate about pub ownership last week. Can anyone stop him?

One slight change of rule here – I’ve dropped ‘email’ from the list of trigger words. Turns out it is recorded on Hansard as ‘e-mail’, and I’m not going to backdate the scores. I’ve replaced it with ‘podcast’ (3 pts). Anyway, Lib Dems Jo Swinson and Lynne Featherstone have raced up the chart this week. Swinson scored heavily with this contribution to the debate on members’ allowances: “I like using podcasts, Twitter and Facebook to engage with my constituents. In particular, I have campaigned in the House… to allow clips of parliament to be shown on YouTube. Perhaps, amid all the criticism, we should commend the prime minister for at least trying to embrace new technology – although, sadly, he has not quite got the hang of it…”

John Leech’s continuing probing of the government over compensation for the Christie hospital (in Manchester, as he always reminds the House…) has seen him move up the chart.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 4th, 2009 at 5:56 pm and is filed under Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats, Westminster. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.