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Polly Toynbee
Toynbee: named columnist of the year at this year's British Press Awards. Photograph: Eamonn Mccabe
Toynbee: named columnist of the year at this year's British Press Awards. Photograph: Eamonn Mccabe

79. Polly Toynbee

This article is more than 16 years old

Job: columnist, the Guardian
Age: 60
Industry: publishing
New entry

It was one of the more unlikely headlines of recent times. "Cameron told: It's time to ditch Churchill," reported the Guardian. "Polly Toynbee, not Winston, should set Tory social policy, says adviser."

Or as the London Evening Standard put it: "Tories go mad for Toynbee".

The adviser was Greg Clark, and the policy was the Tories' attitude to the welfare state. The suggestion prompted a predictable response from traditional Conservatives, but the agenda had been set.

If a newspaper columnist's influence can be measured in the amount of bile generated among critics, then Toynbee's position in this year's MediaGuardian 100 has been well earned.

"She's a no-mark and most people wouldn't even recognise her in the street," wrote Sun columnist Jon Gaunt in May. "But the unfortunate thing is top politicians, police chiefs and those in power love her and often slavishly parrot her ideas, which then quickly become policy."

In the Daily Telegraph, Boris Johnson said: "She incarnates all the nannying, high-taxing, high-spending, school-marminess of Blair's Britain.

"Polly is the high priestess of our paranoid, mollycoddled, risk-averse, airbagged, booster-seated culture of political correctness."

Toynbee is an unlikely Conservative guru. A Guardian columnist since 1998, she was named columnist of the year at this year's British Press Awards.

The judges described her as a "social commentator and wordsmith of enormous judgment and influence. A writer of depth and breadth whose heart beats as strongly as her words. This worthy winner is always challenging and delivers her opinions without fear or favour."

A former social affairs editor at the BBC, Toynbee began her career in journalism writing for the diary in the Observer.

She has written several books including Working Life, about her time working at a Tate & Lyle factory and a Wimpy burger bar - an experiment she repeated when she tried living on the minimum wage on the Clapham Park Estate.

"It can only be good news if the Tories are serious about poverty," she said of the Conservatives' new-found fondness for her thoughts on the welfare state.

"As a lifelong campaigner against all the social damage done by the Tories down the years, it would be churlish not to rejoice if they are now using leaves out of my book."

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