Our person of the year 2008 does not exist … yet.

This person, however, should exist, and we are the poorer because of the absence. So, who is it?

By all logical analysis it should be Barack Obama. Even he might agree, though, that he’s had quite enough publicity for one year already. Besides, The Times (London) has inevitably made him their choice.

You may have noticed we are not a downmarket tabloid so, contrarian as ever, we’ll resist the obvious, with ideologically correct genuflections in his direction.

During this year of wild oscillations of policy, prediction and actuality, one person was missing from the chattering soup here in Britain. Someone with national reach and influence who can say, “Hold on, we tried that in the 1960s/70s and back in the reign of Ethelred the Unready. It didn’t work then, why would it work now?”

We have a national statistician, a national poet, a national medical officer, a national musician, a national scientist, so why not a …

And here is Syntagma’s Person of the Year 2008:

The National Historian.

It may be a blank space now, but it would make some difference if we had one in the future. But who should it be?

The post could be decided by a BBC TV series of shows: Strictly Historical. Votes would come in turn from a panel of eminent judges, a studio audience and, yes, you at home. The comperes would be Vince Cable and Michael Portillo.

In the absence of that this year, we have held our own competition here at Syntagma Towers.

Here are the results:

In second place, Niall Ferguson, whose TV programme, The Ascent of Money on Channel 4, performed some of the tasks of a National Historian by reminding us how the credit crunch came about, and of similar situations and outcomes in the past. It was a creditable perfomance.

The winner, with greater support among our studio audience, was Andrew Roberts, the conservative historian deemed necessary as a counterweight to the prevailing Marxist drift of the nation.

Although the contest was very close, with major voting irregularities, by common consent there was no dance-off.

Congratulations to Andrew on his shadowy victory as the future National Historian of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and Syntagma Person of the Year in reality in 2009.

Note of caution: You may think the above piece is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but I can assure you, we are deadly serious!

John Evans