The Complete Dunt Awards 2024

All the heroes and villains of a lunatic year in politics.

Photo by BoliviaInteligente on Unsplash

Hello and welcome to the first regular Complete Dunt Awards, in what will definitely be an annual feature unless I decide not to do it again.

Are there any awards? No. Is this basically just a way to write copy in mid-December which will still look fine in late December, so I can stay in bed over the Christmas break and drink Baileys? Yes. Does life have any purpose at all? No. Are we all lonely atoms, drifting through the universe without purpose or design? Yes.

Anyway, we better get right into it. I think I got a bit carried away back there.

Politician of the Year: Keir Starmer

©House of Commons

The utter weirdness of Keir Starmer, as a man and a politician, is that this is simultaneously a boring choice and a controversial one. How is that possible? I don't know. The prime minister is a unique individual who combines seemingly contradictory elements.

This guy just won power for Labour for the first time in nearly 20 years. He ruined the Conservative party, reducing it to a rump of 121 seats. It is, by any measure, one of the single most impressive electoral accomplishments of our lifetime. There is no logical option but to acknowledge him as politician of the year. And yet the coverage of Starmer is sullen, grudging, condescending and vitriolic. Never has someone accomplished so much while being treated as if they'd achieved so little. Never has a man been so persistently underestimated, then prove everyone wrong, then be underestimated all over again, as if it never happened. He's a conundrum.

Nor does his attainment end with the election. Yes there are problems - sluggish growth, persistent inflation. But the Starmer administration is also radical in a way that is rarely, if ever, articulated. It is pursuing extremely deep and wide-ranging reforms in key areas, including planning, state-intervention, labour rights, net zero, local government and criminal justice. Years in the future, we'll look back at the scale of change and wonder how there was so little day-to-day recognition of it.

Starmer also deserves this award simply for being interesting. Quite apart from their other inadequacies, the recent set of political leaders have been so psychologically dull. They've all just been so… obvious. So basic. Boris Johnson was an attention seeker, without any other pertinent attributes. Jeremy Cornyn was an unreconstructed 70's socialist who had never interrogated the beliefs he adopted as a young man. Rishi Sunak was a head boy trying to reach the highest position in society without any idea of why he even wanted it.

Starmer is different. He's really quite hard to get a handle on, psychologically. There are convictions there, lurking under the pragmatism. There's blade-edged ruthlessness, covered by decency. There's rank deception, concealed by truthfulness. There's ego, hidden by humility. He's really quite interesting, despite looking and sounding like someone who isn't interesting at all. None of us have really figured him out yet. And for that, if nothing else, we should be very grateful. Thank god for a bit of mystery.

National Treasure: Daniel Craig

So I think what's happened here is that one man has decided to deconstruct and rebuild the concept of masculinity through his public life, like it's some kind of performance art. Craig's Bond didn't have any of the camp edges we saw with Roger Moore: he was this taut, muscular, intense, basically joyless thing. His jaw would clench like his whole personality had been screwed on too tight.

But once he was free, Craig seemed to blossom into this madly varied human being. The thing that's consistent about him is that it's pure sex. He basically throbs with it, whether it's as Bond or in his new act of neon-lit nighttime flamboyance. He used a Belvedere ad to launch a kind of superhero transformation, entering a car in a Bond guise and emerging as this butch, dancing Daily Mail nightmare. From there he just seemed to blossom. A shoot for Loewe’s autumn/winter collection was basically deranged - a sort of crusty, micro-dosed, Scandinavian mix that really defies description.

This element started to find its way into Craig's film work with Glass Onion, but this year it reached its logical end point with Queer, a film based on William Burroughs novella, set in the seedy, druggy, dilapidated, sun-kissed world of gay American expats in Mexico. It really takes a particular kind of attitude, and a particular intent, to do Bond and then accept a role as a sleazy gay man.

The reason Craig deserves these plaudits is not because of his 'bravery' or his commitment to his 'identity' or any of the other dead-metaphor plaudits the progressive left gives people. It's not because he is dismantling masculinity, either. In fact, it's becoming increasingly disturbing to see the word masculinity turned into a slur.

Far from rejecting masculinity, Craig actually seems to be embracing it in all its varied, weird-as-fuck forms: serious and funny, taut and lose, hard and gentle, furrowed brows and colourful jackets. He is valuable precisely because he represents freedom from identity, rather than slavish dedication to it. His public metamorphosis is a joy to watch. If he did not exist we would need to invent him.

Cunt of the Year: Vladimir Putin

Photo by Edoardo Ceriani on Unsplash

There's no competition. The man above it all. The closest thing to a super-villain the 21st Century possesses. By far the single most important figure on the face of the earth.

That's a frustrating thing to write but it's true. Putin demonstrated from the very beginning how right-wing populism would work: the hatred of difference, the obsession with strength, the nihilism, the use of disinformation to obliterate objective reality. He now functions as a litmus test of politicians around the planet, on left and right. Some support him proudly. Some support him sneakily. It is support for an idea - of conformity and power over diversity and freedom. Any other politician on earth, including Donald Trump, is ultimately less powerful, less damaging, less important.

Putin is the original cunt, the OG, bona fide, all the way down. He is the totem. There is no greater or more important project on earth than his total ruination.

Twat of the Year: Allister Heath

From the depraved to the deranged. The Telegraph's Allister Heath has managed to curate his own personal exhibition of the cognitive deterioration of the British right. During the course of the year, his headlines have included:

"Armageddon is upon us, and Britain will never be the same again."

"Western civilisation is being driven to oblivion by the false prophets of 'diversity'."

"We are the West's last generation before the new Dark Age begins."

Actual madness. A human brain on a petri dish, going into spasms. I've literally just opened up his page on the Telegraph and this is what I get: "Starmer's staggering incompetence makes him the worst PM in 50 years." "Trump is the last chance to save the decaying West from terminal decline." "Starmer's Britain is no longer a free country - it's an Orwellian dystopia."

It's a perpetual screech of unhinged, hyper-ventilating intellectual mania. There is no columnist in Britain putting out such a steady stream of gibberish.

The truly pertinent thing about Heath is not his own failure of understanding or restraint. It is the media environment which facilitates it. He's not some freelance journalist. He was an associate editor of the Spectator, the editor of City AM, and is now the editor of the Sunday Telegraph. These are not the ravings of a madman walking around East London in the early morning. They are the words of an extremely senior figure in the conservative media hierarchy.

I used to rather admire the Telegraph. It wasn't for me, obviously. It was for retired old generals haunted by their history of sexual failure. But it had a reassuring sense of instinctive British caution, like an old oak table which is too uneven to properly eat off but has its own unmistakable charm. Those days are long gone now. That table has new owners. They have scratched abusive messages into it using a serrated knife, pissed on it, drilled glory holes into it, vomited over it, sawn off half a leg, and now they try to sell it back to you claiming that they're upholding a great British tradition.

Heath is a prize exhibition in the decline of the right. A man of this temperament should be the subject of an intervention. He should not be editing a British newspaper. The fact that he is shows something has gone terribly wrong in the social milieu he operates in.

Dick of the Year: Tom Tugendhat

Thomas Tugendhat ©House of Commons/Laurie Noble

What a bitter goddamn disappointment to see this man on this list. I once admired Tugendhat. His speech during the Afghanistan withdrawal was extremely powerful. "I've watched good men go into the earth," he said, "taking with them a part of me, a part of all of us." I wish we had that guy trying to be leader of the Opposition in 2024. But unfortunately we got another one.

For a long time, I thought Tugendhat could be the hope of the Conservative party. A better version of itself: gentler, more dignified, engaged in reality, operating with sound judgement. Somewhere along the line he gave up on that idea. His fight to be Tory leader was one piss-poor embarrassment after another until his remaining values seemed to float away in the wind.

Who knows? Maybe he would have reaffirmed his core moderate beliefs when he was leader. We'll never find out, because he failed and showed no sign of succeeding in future. So instead, all we saw was his surrender to the extreme of his party. In the opening stages of the campaign he wrote: "There's a long list of things this election isn't about: the ECHR, gender, tax rates, defence spending, net zero." Why? Because all the Tories agreed on those issues apparently. It was a total submission to the lunatic wing.

He made no attempt to defend old fashioned One Nation Tory values. He offered no articulation of a different world view. Just the acceptance of a new culture war - on the ECHR, trans people, climate change. The full cunt bouquet. What a pitiful disappointment he's turned out to be.

Backbench MP of the Year: Caroline Lucas

Lucas stepped down as an MP at the election, after 14 years in parliament, many of which were also spent as party leader. The Greens now have four MPs, but for her entire time there, she was a solitary, isolated voice.

It really takes something to go in, day after day, and stand up, and make your case. No-one will love you for it. The Tory benches obviously hated her. Labour knew she was a greater threat to them than she was to the Conservatives. In a place defined by partisanship, she was a lone voice. And yet she was eloquent, sincere, heartfelt, forensic and morally clear-sighted. I did not agree with everything she said - that's an absurd benchmark - but it was always thought-through and decently expressed.

It was a privilege, in those dark and difficult times, to have her there, in that Chamber, making the case for progressive values, without the psychodrama of Labour or the instinctive caution of the Lib Dems. She was majestic. We were very lucky to have her.

Columnist of the Year: Philippa Perry

Strange choice, I know. An agony aunt doesn't usually get slotted into the columnist column. But there have been very few writers out there providing a more meaningful political commentary, week after week, than Perry. Her replies to people's intimate questions at the Observer are kind, humane, learned and utterly lacking in judgement. They then veer into something more profound and expansive, a vision of decent human society and the colour and joy it would entail.

"We need both to feel as if we belong and are normal, yet at the same time we want to feel individual and unique," she wrote when she joined the Observer. "The columns help with both these needs at once. Other people's dilemmas and the replies may resonate with us. And when they don't, they give us the opportunity to compare ourselves in relation to what is being discussed."

This is typical of what she does: a perceptiveness and generosity, but also an awareness that answering people's intimate questions is itself a political act, with political implications. Her column does that thing which newspapers achieve sometimes, at their very best. They can occasionally open up from discussion of the mundane into the profound, taking this quickly produced bundle of paper and ink and turning it into something which can have a lasting impact on your life.

Best Political Podcast: If Books Could Kill

This really is a delight, every time. Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri co-host a show that breaks down popular non-fiction books - the kind of thing you'd find in a US airport. Some are business books, with a dark neoliberal undertone. Some are political. None of them are very good. The pair dismantle them with a brutal vigour, in a way that is frankly irreparable. It's quite US based, but most of the lessons are pertinent over here. And anyway I'm mostly there for the glee with which they seek to annihilate someone's reputation. They're funny, charming, remorselessly logical, principled and very, very pissed off at having to live in a world populated exclusively by morons. The recent Sam Harris episode was a particular joy.

Best Political Film: The Substance

Coralie Fargeat's award-winning film stars Demi Moore, in a role that is full of bravery, commitment and zero-fucks-left-to-give late career nonchalance. It is truly magnificent.

People call it body horror, which it is, and therefore compare it to David Cronenberg, which it can withstand. It has that same sense of squelchy, internal mortification. People think that body horror is about gross out moments, because those are the ones that stay with them, but really it's about the deep discomfort that comes from imagining holes where they shouldn't be, things inside us that have no business being there, bodies which do not feel quite right. It's perhaps the most existential of all horror genres, despite also being the most grotesque, or perhaps because of that.

The comparisons do not go far enough though. Fargeat deserves more. There's a bit of Pedro Almodovar in there. There's a bit of Terry Gilliam. There's some early Darren Aronofsky. Most of all, there is a sequence where Moore's character becomes increasingly furious about the treatment of herself as an older woman while violently pounding the cavity of a chicken. It was by far the most glorious bit of cinema this year. It was this moment of real awe as you thought: This film is basically completely out of control. Anything could happen now. They could do anything at all. And what a feeling that is. That's cinema euphoria right there. It's truly a fucking masterpiece. We'll talk about it for years to come.

Best Political TV Show: Traitors Australia, Season Two

Sure sure, you probably think it's Question Time or something. Well I'll tell you now - it isn't and never was. Or maybe you'll be more subtle, but still sophisticated, and say it's Wolf Hall. No. It is a reality TV show. And not even the relatively classy UK version, but the bargain basement didn't-even-put-them-in-a-castle Australian version.

But the thing is: nothing compared. Nothing even came close to the Traitors Australia. No other TV show managed to weave together so many political themes, none of them managed to say so much about the human condition, none of them had an ending of such supreme dramatic resolution that it felt like someone had brought Arthur Miller back to life and forced him to write scripts for Endemol.

All of the key political themes are in the Traitors: conformity, group-think, individuality, reason, superstition, unforeseen consequences, binary opposition, loyalty, betrayal, and the bitter murderous gap between tactics and strategy. It's all here, in this reality TV show. I've never seen anything like it. I might never see anything like it again.

Best Political Book: Everything Must Go, by Dorian Lynskey

Look, don't tell him I did this OK? Seriously, it's too embarrassing. I almost opted for something else, simply to avoid this happening, but this is unfortunately the correct answer. So awkward as it is, I have to stick to it.

The thing is that Everything Must Go is not even technically a political book. It's an account of how we imagine the end of the world. But Dorian commits to that shit in a way that is borderline insane and also - I'm saying this as his colleague - entirely predictable. By that I mean: I think he might have literally read, watched and listened to nearly every account of the end of the world which exists. I dunno. Certainly, he must at this point be the living human who has experienced the most material about this subject.

It's all fascinating, especially for genre nerds like me who want all the info on zombies and nuclear weapons and the like. But at the end of all that there is a political message. The first is that real life demonstrates how wrong so many end-of-the-world stories are about the barbarism of humanity. As it happens, most people's first instinct is to go find the people they love and tell them that they love them. Only love does not decay. This is an important thing to remember when people around the world vote for cruelty.

Secondly, looking at the end of the world really tells us more about humans than it does the ways the world might end. In particular it is about optimism and pessimism and the fact that the choice between these two things is not just a psychological or an emotional one, but also a political one.

It reminded me of this, one of the most beautiful film reviews I've seen, about the film Happy-Go-Lucky. "[Optimism] is not a solution for the problems of the world. It's a choice made in the face of the problems of the world. "

Best Political Comic: Judge Dredd, A Better World

Writers Rob Williams and Arthur Wyatt team up with artist Henry Flint for this story, which pokes around at the most sensitive areas of Dredd's world. A judge in the accounts department has built the case for a more progressive approach to crime. Helping citizens through social initiatives will reduce crime, which will reduce cost. And for the first time, Dredd is forced to confront the ultimate threat to his fascist authority, one which is far scarier than Judge Death: the benign empirical reality of liberal policy making.

What follows is worthy of comparison to The Wire. It's about the systems we put in place, the incentives they create, and the way they continue even when we can demonstrate that they are no longer effective. It also has that grinding sense of inevitability that all the best tragedies have, that sense that things can only ever end one way, that you know they cannot end any other way, and yet a part of you can't help but hope they will, and that this is this part which will ultimately break your heart. The collected edition comes out in January.

Best Political Moment of 2024: Kieran Mullan speech in the assisted dying debate

I really wanted to pick the moment Liz Truss lost her seat, because that was when I was happiest. I really absolutely did not want to pick something as odd and esoteric as this. But perhaps that's the point. Mullan is a Tory frontbencher. I don't know much about him. Presumably he holds all sorts of abysmal views. Almost certainly he'll do some dreadful shit in the next year that makes me regret this. But regardless, he was the man charged with summing up at the end of the assisted dying debate. I wrote about it extensively in the newsletter at the time. Here's what I said:

He began by laying out the consequences of a vote against the bill.

"Access to assisted dying could reduce suffering for the terminally ill. That is a choice some people would like to have. Some people would make that choice without any undue pressure. If you vote against this bill today, they won't have that choice. I caution against avoiding facing up to that hard moral reality by arguing that whatever people may fear about dying can always be managed by modern medicine. For all it can achieve, modern medicine cannot achieve everything."

Then he laid out the consequences of voting for the bill.

"I don't think opponents of this bill can deny this any more than proponents of this bill can deny that if this law is passed it would represent the crossing of a significant legal, societal and moral Rubicon. Every other expectation we have of the state is to have it extend and protect life. We would instead be asking the state to procure the medicines, provide the staff, and sign off in the courts a process that is designed to lead, and will, to someone's death."

It wasn't particularly emotional, like many of the other contributions that day. It wasn't even very charismatic or well delivered. He got handed this impossible task: sum up a free vote debate kinda for the government except that it isn't really because the government technically has no position. And he thought probably the best way to approach that weird brief was to lay out both sides of the argument. But whether he knows it or not, he did so in a way that would have had Isaiah Berlin smiling down at him from the clouds.

He was not just pointing out two options. He was saying the great tortured truth that lies at the heart of politics: that tragedy is unavoidable, that sometimes choices must be made even though both will have negative consequences, that we must face up to these choices regardless, that we must not pretend they are easier than they are. It is not the politics of 'but'. It is the politics of 'and'. And whether he intended it or not, Mullan had laid it out in all its clarity, and with all of its painful moral imperatives.

It was strange, in a way, that it was a Tory frontbencher doing it. But it was fitting that it was. The worst people in politics - you know the sort, you've seen them online - will condemn you for thinking this way. But thinking this way is the best that politics can be. It feels great when a political antagonist shows themselves in the best possible light.

Happy new year. See you in 2025.