Foot in Mouth award 2017

Winner - Jacob Rees-Mogg

Jacob Rees-Mogg is this year’s Foot in Mouth Award winner, for suggesting that a reliance on food banks is ‘rather uplifting’.

Rees-Mogg, dubbed the ‘Honourable Member for the 18th century’, shows no sign of joining the 21st.

Rees-Mogg is the MP for Somerset East.

Foot in Mouth runners-up

Donald Trump

Trump was on great gobbledygook form during his first year as President. Here he is at his blathering best.

We’re gonna find out. And -- and, by the way, when I say you’re gonna find out. You can never really find, you know, there are gonna be -- no matter what numbers we come up with, there are gonna be lots of people that did things that we’re not going to find out about. But we will find out because we need a better system where that can’t happen.

Boris Johnson

Boris speaks for himself, although someone less prone to his routine and unique brand of offensive and deeply-inappropriate howler might be better.

They literally have a vision to turn Sirte into the next Dubai. The only thing they have got to do is clear the dead bodies away.

AC Grayling

Usually a reliable source of empathetic wisdom, Grayling here loses his way, and sadly keeps going.

It is so predictable that a lazy reading of any discussion about how a democratic order can rebut the patronising view taken by Plato that ‘ordinary people’ are not fit to have a vote, that I repeatedly stressed that the great debate about how to honour the right of citizens to be the source of political authority in a state was precisely about the means to prove Plato wrong.