Word from Westminster Awards 2025

2025 has been the year Westminster stopped talking about the election and started living with it. Labour’s to-do list met the realities of office, backbenchers found their voices, and the opposition searched for a reset button.

With plenty achieved, argued over, and still unresolved, as the year winds down, it’s time for WFW’s annual awards!

Winner of the year

Our first award is for Winner of the Year, and the shortlist reflects just how fragmented and strange British politics has become in 2025.

First up...Zack Polanski. The London Assembly member and recently elected Green Party leader has helped push the Green Party from protest into something closer to purpose. He has given the party sharper messaging and a clearer edge, energising activists (with the help of rap duo Rizzle Kicks) while pushing conversations about power and relevance. Whether that translates into long-term influence remains to be seen, but the momentum behind Polanski is real.

Lucy Powell’s winner nomination is a story of political recovery. Sacked by her boss Keir Starmer in September from the Cabinet in the aftermath of Angela Rayner’s resignation, Powell almost immediately returned to the spotlight after seizing Rayner’s crown as Labour’s deputy leader, underlining both her resilience and her continued relevance within the party. While she technically remains outside the Government, she now has her own elected mandate from restive MPs and party members.

Shabana Mahmood has also made the list following her promotion to Home Secretary this year, stepping into a role where Labour badly needed a fighter. Mahmood has taken the battle directly to the Conservatives and Reform on crime, borders, and public confidence, projecting authority in a brief that has historically caused Labour real difficulty. At the same time, she’s a rare Labour figure fearless about taking the fight to the Left, memorably slapping down Green MP Carla Denyer on her border reforms.

But the award goes to Reform UK’s leading man, Nigel Farage.

2025 has been Reform’s year. Polling consistently places the party at unprecedented highs, a record-breaking donation bolstered the party's credibility, and Farage has once again proven his ability to turn insurgency into momentum. Reform set the agenda day after day through a combination of old-fashioned morning press conferences and market-leading social media accounts. Even when Farage is not in the Commons for PMQs (often), he invariably comes up. All of this while somehow still finding the time to host his GB News show, remaining a nightly presence in the national conversation. Whether admired or despised, over the last 12 months, Farage has combined media dominance with political growth in a way few can match!

Loser of the year

It says something fairly extraordinary about the past twelve months that every contender for this year’s Word From Westminster Loser of the Year award comes from the Labour Party. After a landslide victory and the second half of last year to get to grips with Government, this should have been the easy bit. Instead, Labour’s first full year in power has been defined by drift, dysfunction and an alarming appetite for unforced errors.

Former Ambassador to the United States Peter Mandelson surely deserves an early mention. Forced out over his historic relationship with the disgraced Jeffrey Epstein, Mandelson left a gaping hole in one of the most powerful jobs in British politics — and one he was widely seen to be doing rather well. Had events stopped there, it would already have been a grim end to a long career. Unfortunately, they did not. 

Being photographed urinating in public after a visit to George Osborne’s house ensured that Mandelson’s final act was less elder statesman, more farce.

Andy Burnham is our second nominee, and proof that reputations can deflate remarkably quickly. Long cast as Labour’s prince over the water — the man patiently waiting in Manchester while Westminster tied itself in knots — Burnham chose to put himself back in the fray for the Labour leadership for once again this year. Unfortunately, he did so by urging the Government to stop being “in hock to the bond markets” on the eve of Labour party conference. The line landed with a thud, raising fresh doubts about his economic seriousness and sharply diminishing his prospects as a future Prime Minister. Always a tryer, Burnham nevertheless starts 2026 at the heart of plots to return to Westminster in a staged by-election before the May elections so he can be ready to seize the crown.

Our third nominee is not a person, but an address. No.10 Downing Street has had a disastrous year, marked by muddled messaging, an underpowered communications operation and briefing war debacles that have done real damage. Starmer himself has struggled, but the dysfunction around him — particularly the spectacular backfiring of anonymous briefings linked to Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney against Health Secretary Wes Streeting — has left Downing Street looking reactive, thin-skinned and oddly amateur.

But the winner — or loser of all losers — resides next door in No.11. Chancellor Rachel Reeves takes the award with depressing ease. Over the past year, she has been forced into reversals on key revenue-raising policies including welfare reform and means-testing winter fuel payments, forcing her to return with tens of billions of pounds in tax rises at the Autumn Budget despite explicit pledges not to do so. The confused and contradictory run-up to the Budget — marked by leaks, disingenuous briefings and abrupt changes of course — only compounded the damage. Her credibility is shot, her political capital exhausted, and it feels unlikely she will still be Chancellor by next autumn.

Survivor of the year

2025 has been a tumultuous year, with a churn of resignations both in and out of Government. But amidst the political chaos, who has survived?

Our first contender is Reform UK’s Head of Policy Zia Yusuf. Previously Head of Reform’s Department of Government Efficiency, and before that Chairman, Yusuf bluntly resigned in June, saying that working to get the party elected was no longer “a good use of my time”. The resignation followed new Reform MP Sarah Pochin’s call to ban the burqa, but no reasoning was given. Two days later, he reversed his decision, saying he had been “urged to reconsider”. In a party defined by volatility, Yusuf’s brief exit - and even swifter return - somehow cemented his position rather than ending it.

Next up is Labour long-timer Ed Miliband, Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero. In September’s reshuffle, rumours swirled that the Prime Minister had attempted to shift Miliband out of DESNZ and into a housing position - a move widely interpreted as a demotion. Yet Miliband held firm, surviving the reshuffle intact and now touted as a leadership challenger to Starmer, proving institutional weight and ideological clarity still count for something in modern Labour.

In a year that has seen further Tory decline at the ballot box, a sure survivor is their leader, Kemi Badenoch. Beginning the year firmly on the back foot, she was fighting for her position at the despatch box and laughed out of PMQs. Fast forward twelve months, and Badenoch is briefed, cutting, and relentless, taking every opportunity to take down Starmer while consolidating her grip on a diminished but disciplined party. She’s rewarded with a small but real improvement in polling and a story to tell.

But our clear winner for survivor of the year is Angela Rayner.

A well-liked, accessible figure, Rayner’s failure to pay enough stamp duty on her second home triggered a full Government reshuffle in September and appeared, briefly, to mark a career-ending scandal. Such a huge fall from grace should surely have been the end. Instead, three months on, Rayner has re-emerged at the centre of party leadership discussions and apparently with a quiet campaign operation up and running - bruised, but very much still standing.

WTF moment of 2025

It could be said that the whole of 2025 was one big “WTF” moment in the unpredictable world of Westminster, but WFW have pinned down 4 moments that had us gathered around the office television saying WTF?

From the moment it failed to launch smoothly, Your Party was a clear nominee for this shortlist, as a political party determined to test the limits of organisational chaos. Missing funds, resigning MPs and rulebook rows set the tone, before the party’s first conference tipped fully into farce. Founders Jeremy Corbyn and Zara Sultana both failed to secure the leadership, with members opting instead for committee control. Sultana’s decision to boycott the first day in protest at… something only added to the confusion. Even by Westminster standards, this was impressive.

An honourable mention goes to Rachel Reeves crying at PMQS. This was a moment that unfolded before anyone quite realised what they were watching. As the Prime Minister brushed off questions from the Opposition Leader about his confidence in Chancellor Rachel Reeves, the cameras revealed Reeves behind him, visibly distressed. The Prime Minister carried on, unaware. Reeves, meanwhile, was weeping tears. PMQs rarely pauses the markets — but this one did.

A late nominee, but this year’s Budget had to make it to the shortlist. Leaks, pre-briefed policies and frustrated interventions from the Speaker suggested chaos had peaked. Then the Office for Budget Responsibility accidentally published its full Budget assessment an hour early, and even the BBC cut away from PMQs to read out the Budget itself. A workplace error on a scale few will ever match.

But this year's winner goes to a sequinned Andrea Jenkyns serenading the masses at Reform's party conference.

Reform’s first major party conference in Birmingham was always going to be a closely watched affair. In an event that had pyrotechnics, special guests and flair more like a US political rally, the bar for WTF moments was always going to be high. Enter Andrea Jenkyns - Mayor of Greater Lincolnshire. Jenkyns entered the arena, belting out her own song “Insomniac” while wearing more sequins than the WFW team has seen in one place and a Union Jack brooch. This was a moment that stopped us in our tracks, and that's why this was 2025’s ultimate WTF moment.