POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, Martin and I talk about the BBC’s pathological scepticism towards the new Universal theme park and how Andy Burnham has (reportedly) thrown a spanner into the works at Heathrow. Then we speak to Anya Martin about why we should impose a tax on autonomous vehicles – before it’s too late! Listen here, or wherever you get your pods!
Last week I went mildly viral – at least within a half-mile radius of Parliament.
You might have seen why. Following the New York Times theory that nobody actually cares about written words, and what people really want is games, I created two little games of my own.
MP Recall came first, and this was a memory test. Players were given five minutes to type the names of as many Members of Parliament as they could remember, aided only by some floating faces in rotation, to help jog memories.
Then I made MP Chain. This was a more fast-paced game, where players were given the name of an MP, and asked to identify a given member, when presented with two headshots.1
Both games were pretty successful – MP Recall has had over 7,200 completed games with over 245,000 MPs successfully recalled, and MP Chain was played over 60,000 times,2 with over 300,000 choices recorded.3
However, I’m not dropping some big numbers just to show off – that’s merely a happy side-effect. What’s more important is that these games have inadvertently given me a rich dataset.
For a long time I’ve been obsessed with how much people actually know about politics. I still regularly think about the 2020 survey where 11% of people claimed to know “a fair amount” about then Shadow Chancellor Anneliese Dodds, which I think is just laughably untrue. Nobody knows “a fair amount” about Anneliese Dodds – the survey just showed that 11% of people are liars.
Now, my data does not speak to exactly this question of what the general public actually knows, nor am I making any claim that my data is in any sense meaningful or scientific.
But I think it is perhaps a snapshot of which Members have made an impact in the inside-game of politics. Not the air war, in the battle for attention from the real general public – but in terms of impact amongst the brain-poisoned Westminster obsessives who either work in and around Parliament, or at least spend a lot of time posting on social media like they do. The real sickos, in other words.
So let’s dig through the data, and discover who are some of the Westminster Village’s most and least recognisable faces.
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Recalling the data
Let’s start with MP Recall, and the Members who were most often remembered off the tops of people’s heads.
I think this was a surprisingly tricky challenge. Even for obsessives like the people who read obscure Substack newsletters about politics, when you’re presented with such a large and general category, there’s no reliable way to methodically work your way through all of the names in your head in just five minutes.4
And I think the data on who people actually remember is, to an extent, pretty unsurprising. At the top of the list is the Prime Minister – a full 76% of players successfully named Andy Burnham, and he was followed by all of the other big hitters you’d expect, including Nigel Farage, Kemi Badenoch and Ed Davey. Though the drop-off is quite stark – how quickly people have forgotten Rishi Sunak and Rachel Reeves!
In fact, I think the data is arguably evidence that for most people, the cast of known characters in politics is rather small – the top ten most recalled MPs accounted for 17.3% of all names entered, and the top 50 accounted for 47.8% – suggesting a small core of ultra-visible MPs, and a very long tail of MPs, who are presumably spending less time on TV and podcasts, and more time doing thankless constituency work.
On the flip side, the least recalled list is dominated mostly by Sinn Féin MPs, who refuse to actually take their seats in Westminster – so are effectively just names on ballot papers every few years, and that’s it. They don’t turn up or do anything, and they don’t even have photos on the Parliament website.
However, Sinn Féin aside, there are also four Labour MPs at the bottom of the list, with the lowest-ranked being Paul Foster, MP for South Ribble. I’d never heard of him either – but he spent 15 years in the army, serving in both the Gulf War and Kosovo. So now we all know something about him.
The least recognised Labour MPs also have something else in common: They were all elected in 2024. Which perhaps shouldn’t be surprising – as MPs elected in 2024 had an average recall rate of 2.8% – compared with 7.9% for all MPs on average. So stick around long enough, and people might remember who you are.
Only connect
Now let’s look at MP Chain. Unlike the first game, this wasn’t a test of memory – but of recognition. Who has a face that people vaguely recognise?5
Here’s the leaderboard for most and least recognised MPs, with the percentage of times the player guessed them correctly in head-to-head match-ups with another MP:
I think again unsurprisingly the most recognised MPs are all household names – at least in the homes of the sort of weirdos who played this game.
Perhaps the most surprising thing in the data then – which I probably should have predicted, is that disproportionately some of the most recognised MPs were those members from minority backgrounds. Though I suspect some of this is an artefact of the way the game was designed.
For example, here are the top twenty most recognised Labour MPs who aren’t in the Cabinet – they’re either pretty famous in Westminster terms, or have a name that gives little doubt which face they’re most likely to be when drawn against another MP at random.
…Except, that is, in two cases.
This is going to get a little awkward, because the two least recognised MPs – the only two with less recognition than a coin toss would predict – are Mark Hendrick and Peter Bedford. Hendrick is of Anglo-Somali heritage, and Bedford has British Indian and English heritage – but I guess their names offered fewer clues to players.
Anyway, the other striking thing about the Chain data was that the 2024 factor also made a difference here, with MPs elected recently getting recognised correctly 77.3% of the time on average, compared to 85.8% for older MPs.
The big list
So those are some stats on which MPs are the most memorable and most recognisable in Westminster. But the chances are there will be certain Westminster insiders reading and thinking… what about me? Or what about my boss? And what about that bastard who got the ministerial job I wanted?
The good news is that I’m going to publish the full list below – but the bad news is because I’m a smart business guy, I'm going to put it behind my paywall. So if you want to see the full list, why not consider subscribing to support my work?
Now here’s the list in full: