He tops elections for the parliamentary committee, and wins the Channel 4 award for Commons Questioner of the Year.
The first questioner of the evening in fact went to the heart of the matter by asking why Townsend had made her narrator male.
But no one on television has been a tougher critic of the Iraq war or a tougher questioner of the war's backers.
Elihu Vedder's "The Questioner of the Sphinx" (1863) shows a dark-skinned traveller crouched by the head of a sphinx that emerges from the sand in which it has been submerged for centuries.
John Redwood, Tory trade and industry spokesman, was Questioner of the Year; Backbencher of the Year was Quentin Davies, Tory MP for Grantham and Stamford; and Margaret, Countess of Mar, was Peer of the Year for instigating an inquiry into Gulf War chemicals and the health of the armed forces.
Around the time Albert Bierstadt painted "Looking Down Yosemite Valley" and Edouard Manet exhibited "Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe" ("Luncheon on the Grass"), the American artist Elihu Vedder, who had never visited Egypt, created a brooding, emphatically plain canvas, "The Questioner of the Sphinx".
