Oh Calumny, oh betrayal! What villainy and varletry is this?

It is your scribe’s sad duty to inform you that despite rigidly rigorous vetting procedures which are frankly deleterious to the health and sanity of all those foolhardy enough to submit to them, combined with a ruthless policy of retribution, our security has been breached.

Yes, in an act of blatant bastardry, perfidious plundering and mendacious menacing not witnessed since North Korea entered into the online film review business, this column has suffered a cyber-attack aimed directly at the blackened heart of its belief system.

Despite all the recipients being sworn to secrecy on pain of, well, pain really, and the judging panel consisting entirely of the voices in its head, somehow advance notice of the 2014 McGuffin honours of the year list has been leaked to a public desperate for a hint as to where and from whence these priceless baubles will be bestowed.

Is nothing sacred anymore?!!

Years of tradition cast aside in a cynical, nay knavely, act of sabotage and subterfuge that will shake this nation to its very core.
It’s either that or the beer mat got left in the pub.

However this column is no stranger to adversity and, unlike a certain US purveyor of tedious cinematic titillation to the intellectually challenged, it refuses to cravenly capitulate to such cowardly attempts at intimidation.

People often come up to this column and ask… well actually they don’t, since what it prefers to euphemistically describe as The Incident but of which the magistrate took a rather dimmer view.

Let us not dwell on that tawdry tribulation however. The tag comes off soon.

Yet, remarkably, on occasion someone as unhinged as your author neglects their sense of self-preservation and ventures to enquire as to the thought processes which go into the annual selection.

To which this column invariably replies: “Same again please.”

In fact, the process is remarkably similar to the one employed by the government when selecting those put forward for recognition in the new year’s honours list.

Namely casting around for someone who embodies those crucial qualities of blatant self-promotion, palm-greasing, above-average dedication to the erosion of democracy, and — in most cases — still being alive.

That and both lists tend to feature a disproportionate number of Tories, crooks and cock-up artists and occasionally individuals who encapsulate all three in one.

This week saw BOTH former chairs of the child abuse inquiry and Network Rail’s equivalent of the fat controller receive gongs from Her Maj.

Baroness Butler-Sloss and Fiona Woolf QC you will recall both had to step aside from their appointed roles due to rather spectacular conflicts of interest, much to the embarrassment of Home Secretary Theresa May.

Whereas the aforementioned David Ward was bunged an OBE for doing more to disrupt Britain’s rail service than the Luftwaffe and Thatcher combined.

They say the British love a loser but somehow I don’t think that’s what they meant.

But enough prevarication and prattle, let’s get to the main event. Without further ado here are the big winners in this year’s grandiloquent gathering of graspers, chisellers and cads.

First up with have the Tony Blair Award for Outstanding Services to Nation Destabilisation.

Blair himself having been ruled out as a fourtime winner, the field was wide open this year but eventually it came down to a three-horse race.

Clegg, Cameron and Miliband all did their utmost to ensure Scottish independence by alternately threatening, cajoling, bribing and berating the electorate north of the border this summer with their risible Better Together campaign.

Eleventh hour promises of devo-max may have swung the balance but there could only be one winner and Cameron gleefully twisting the knife within hours of the result has pretty much guaranteed that if there’s ever a re-run it will be a landslide and he’ll be buried underneath it.

The Derek Jameson Memorial Medal for Services to the Media. A close run thing in this, its inaugural year.

What with Operation Yewtree still in full swing it appears no ’70s celeb is safe, and then the Beeb becoming cheerleader in chief for Farage and his cronies.

But there was one clear candidate for this honour. Step forward Andy Coulson.

The former News of the Screws editor and No 10 spin doctor was banged up for 18 months earlier this year for his role in the phone hacking scandal.

When commentators talk about the worst excesses of the media do they mean you Andy? They surely do.

Then we come to the special categories created specifically to honour those individuals who routinely go above and beyond the call of duty.

The Iago Award for Promoting Loyalty and Unity. Tory defectors Mark Reckless and Douglas Carswell may have thought they were quids in here, but for a lifetime of duplicitous double-dealing the award goes to Tony Blair, who yet again stabbed Miliband in the back this week in furtherance of his own larcenous legacy.

The Bernard Manning Posthumous Award for Community Relations.

Both the Tories — for their eastern European-tinged Zulu impression (“Bulgarians, thousands of them”) — and Jeremy Clarkson for single-handedly reigniting the Falklands war came close, as did the Ferguson police force but the hands-down champion was US Republican majority whip Steve Scalise, who it emerged this week had decided to address a white-supremacist rally organised by the former head of the KKK.

The David Copperfield Award for Spectacular Disappearances. There were a number of candidates for this particular gewgaw — the Lib Dems have pretty much retreated up their own fundaments and Chris Grayling has ensured that the last vestiges of what is laughably known as British justice have evaporated.

But the head and shoulders front-runner was North Korean despot Kim Jong Un. The dear leader departed from the public stage for a number of months this year leading to intense speculation as to the cause of the sudden invisibility of a man more widely known for making others vanish.

It eventually transpired that the diminutive dictator had suffered from a surfeit of cheese, having gorged himself to such an extent that his ankles collapsed under the strain, also making him a contender for the Who Me Guv? Bizarre Excuse of the Year Award.

Previous winners of this much-contested category include Lib Dem Mark Oaten, who blamed his affair with a rent boy on his advancing hair loss and the Bishop of Southwark. But in this age of misspeaking MPs this year’s clear winner was Ukip candidate Kerry Smith.

Who knew painkillers could turn you into a racist, homophobic bigot?

Happy 2015 folks! Let’s face it, it can’t be as bad as last year… can it?

A previous version of this article mistakenly referred to Simon Hughes as a previous winner of the Who Me Guv? Bizarre Excuse of the Year Award, when in fact it was Mark Oaten. We regret the error.