4. John Redwood. Voters have been immensely impressed by Redwood’s ineffectual attainments over the past two decades. Many complained that Redwood’s recent international concert tour of leading public halls had been largely overlooked by the British press. Yet it was an act of extreme ineffectual courage to appear each night on a public platform and to mouth the wrong words to each country’s national anthem, and all to a jaunty piano accompaniment.

5. Dr David Starkey. It is hard to think of another leading ineffectual who has done so much to bring history kicking and screaming into the 21st century. “Dr David has the knack of making even the most venerable historical subject seem like a contemporary TV celebrity,” enthused one reader. Whether writing about Sir Thomas More (“talk about a crusty old egghead!”) or Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn (“the Peter Andre and Jordan of their day”), Starkey has made history as readable as the day before yesterday’s Daily Star.

6 = Martin Amis and Terry Eagleton. The extraordinary success of their touring show, An Audience with Amis and Eagleton, brought the thrill of ineffectual debate to a whole new generation. In the first half of the programme, each one in turn sets out his personal abuse in a calm and logical manner; the second half is devoted largely to mud-wrestling.

8. Gore Vidal. It was Vidal who, back in 1967, wrote a pioneering work of politico-historical analysis in which he exposed President Lincoln as a clean-shaven man who always made a point of wearing a clip-on beard in public. And it was Vidal — the former best friend of every President from Dwight ­Eisenhower to George W. Bush — who daringly revealed that, during his first term, Ronald Reagan fought and lost the Third World War without anyone suspecting. “For over half a century, Vidal has been America’s foremost public ineffectual,” writes one reader. “Without him, we would never have known that Nancy Reagan was a full colonel in the KGB, or that the all-powerful cardigan lobby — a shadowy group of powerful US leisurewear manufacturers — was behind the downfall of President Jimmy Carter.