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Competition No 3879

Set by Brendan J O'Byrne, 25 April

Victoria Coren in the Observer wrote that if you could be summed up in a paragraph, there was something wrong with you. We asked for just such a summing up.

Report by Ms de Meaner

Not bad. Hon menshes to Bill Greenwell (Jesus) and G M Davis (Sven). The winners can have £20 each, except Ian Birchall, who gets £15, and David

Silverman, who gets £25 and the vouchers.

Born in Manchester in 1946, he was the youngest person in Manchester at the time. Sister McGregor was funnily enough celebrating her 29th birthday when he brought her total of deliveries, since her transfer from Liverpool Maternity Hospital in 1945, to 50, of which 19 were boys and an incredible 31 were girls. He also raised the average birth weight to 7lb 8oz and average dilation at delivery to 10cm. She was well pleased. His father sprained his left ankle on the way to the hospital, on a raised paving stone on the corner of Oxford Road and Nelson Street, but fortunately was able to limp the remaining 45 yards to the maternity ward. The following 24 years were relatively uneventful, until he joined Match of the Day, since when he has commentated on 1,539 matches, 14 more than Barry Davies and 36 more than the late Brian Moore.

David Silverman (John Motson)

The greyness of life, whether from a childhood surrounded by concrete dust and gnomes, or from an inability to focus on how many O-levels he'd gained, or from being an accountant - not just on the surface but deep, deep into his soul - or from a determined attraction to koi carp, or from some amalgam of all these - the way that in childhood, Plasticine, however colourful the separate stripes, always ended up an unappetising grey - this was his aura. There was a spark of interest around some cartoon involving underpants, and a short-lived flicker around some unlikely affair - but only when the general view was, "What? Him?" Finally, when he was knighted, there was only a collective rummaging in the corners of the collective mind for dates, images, something to anchor him to, something to retrieve from the blurred years.

D A Prince (John Major)

His family motto is: "I never change my mind." As one of the leading legal authorities of this century, his integrity is unimpeachable, and his heroic isolationism is a byword among attorneys general. For example, between 7 March and 17 March 2003, he sealed himself in a reinforced steel box, suspended somewhere above Ben Nevis, out of reach of mobiles, faxes, phones or courier pigeons. He closed his eyes tightly inside his box and stuck his fingers in his ears if he heard so much as a squeak from outside. He adhered to a strict diet of water and dead rats. On 17 March he emerged, clear-eyed, iron-steady of purpose, and pronounced his legal opinion to be exactly the same as it had been ten days previously, without one scintilla or iota of a difference, divergence, disparity or divagation whatsoever or whichsoever.

Josh Ekroy (Lord Goldsmith)

A bandwagoning self-seeker who would shut his old granny out of the country to make a point, he is obstinate to the degree of antagonism and judgementally harsh to the point of excommunication. He has the slimy smile of the cat who has eaten all the cream and destroyed the evidence. Hypocritical and high-minded, he is not afraid to call his opponent a liar when the latter has merely exercised his right to be economical with the truth, a right fully exploited by himself and his party. He dresses quite well, but still manages to look like a bookie's runner.

Katie Mallett (Michael Howard)

Plays football; muffs penalties. Lots of money; swears at his wife. Wife sings badly; children have silly names.

Ian Birchall (David Beckham)

No 3882 Set by Josh Ekroy

We hear a lot about "word-of-mouth" successes, but much less about what these words are, exactly. We want what might have been said early on about any well-known "success" of your choice.

Max 150 words by 26 May. E-mail: comp@newstatesman.co.uk

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