A brief history of the Parliamentary Beard of the Year Award
If you’ve been attending to the Labour leadership election you can hardly have missed that the winner Jeremy Corbyn has been five times winner of the Parliamentary Beard of the Year Award.
You may have missed that Corbyn’s Deputy, Tom Watson, is also a former winner of the Award.
The question is often asked why Corbyn has won so often and who it is that determines this.
The Award is given by the Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers.
The origins of the Parliamentary Award lie in the reality that the BLF organising committee got tired of MPs promoting themselves for the annual Beard of the Year Award at the end of December and determined that it might be best to allow Parliamentarians to have their own Award.
It was launched in 2001.
For some years the winner was determined by BLF researchers checking which Parliamentarians had beards and if any of them had stayed awake long enough in Parliament to say or do anything notable at all, and particularly obviously about beards.
Hansard was the main tool used.
Jeremy Corbyn won more often the most because he did actually make occasional Parliamentary contributions about beards and also because the Tories in particular made a thing of his informal appearance in the Chamber.
The BLF is not a party political organisation however and the Parliamentary Beard of the Year shortlist tries to have some balance between Labour, Tories, LibDems (more difficult currently) and others (the SNP will certainly feature on the 2015 list).
In more recent times as technology has moved on the Award has moved to on-line voting. This is open to all although precautions are taken to stop any plural voting.
As with pretty much any democratic election the winner tends to be determined by the candidate who mobilises their voters the most effectively.
As Jeremy Corbyn has noted he is proud of his beard perhaps it is no surprise he has also managed to gather the support to win the Award a record 5 times.
Will he win in 2015? That’s up to you