End games

Will Self and Ralph Steadman have produced their own review of the year.

The pair were commissioned by the Today programme, which itself is staging a poll to determine who runs Britain. The nominations comprise a fairly predictable bunch, but I'd argue there should've been a better distinction between who rules (Blair, Brown etc.) and who actually runs the country. From this perspective, the latter distinction should really go to someone like the person who gets to decide how much money the Royal Mint is allowed to put into circulation, the person who gets to draw up the national rail timetable, or even the person at the Office of National Statistics who calculates how many people there are who officially need to be "run" in the first place.