THE JUDGES' FIFTH CABINET
Prime Minister Deputy PM Chancellor Foreign Lord Chancellor Home Education/Employm Environment Leader of Commons Culture Cabinet Office International Develop Social Security Agriculture Leader of the Lords Trade/Industry Health Regions Defence Transport Treasury Chief Sec	Peter Hain Yvette Cooper Kenneth Clarke Tony Benn Stella McCartney Alastair Campbell John Major Peter Mandelson Ken Livingstone Harriet Harman Anne Robinson Sven Eriksson Tracey Emin John Redwood Prince William Michael Heseltine Anna Kournikova Michael Portillo John Reid Robin Cook Alistair Darling	54 52 50 50 45 44 38 38 34 30 30 29 29 28 26 26 24 24 23 21 20 715

It is the most dramatic resurrection since Lazarus: two politicians who have scored badly until now in our Fantasy Politics game emerge at the head of the judges' latest cabinet.

Meeting last Tuesday, the judges decided that the Prime Minister's press secretary, Alastair Campbell, had suffered enough. Over the three previous rounds, he had recorded the highest minus score of any player and he would still have been bottom, even without the double scores awarded or debited to bonus players. That was the result of his role in Peter Mandelson's resignation and his comment about "bog-standard" comprehensives. Over the past fortnight, however, his handling of the tricky election timing issue has been masterly: we must go to the polls now, he has suggested, for the sake of foreign confidence in the tourist industry.

So Campbell gets in as Deputy PM. But at the head of the cabinet table sits Michael Meacher. With the multiple-home-ownership scandal behind him, this non-Cabinet minister has emerged, in the foot-and-mouth crisis, as the countryside tsar, even chairing a committee in which a Cabinet member (Chris Smith) sits below him. It is his moment in the sun, for which he has waited more than 30 years.

Other supposedly second-rank politicians also did well in this round: Kenneth Clarke, though a backbencher, is still a strong favourite as the next Tory leader; Lady Thatcher, though old and slightly batty, is clearly regarded by many Tory MPs as a bigger asset than their present leader; Ken Livingstone, the political maestro, keeps spinning out a victory he has already won over the government on the London Tube; and Harriet Harman ("a model of how to behave when you're sacked as a minister," according to one judge) took credit for the Chancellor's pro-woman Budget as a result of her persistent behind-the-scenes lobbying. For the first time, politicians from the Celtic fringes scored strongly, with both Gerry Adams and David Trimble creating a good impression in the US and John Swinney, leader of the Scottish Nationalists, inflicting a defeat on the coalition government north of the border.

The celebrities performed less strongly than in previous weeks. Catherine Zeta-Jones got the highest marks and a position at the Department of Culture after the Screen Writers' Guild gave an award to the film Traffic, in which she starred. Ali G, Harry Potter, Prince William and Stella McCartney were all rewarded by the judges for their consistent good publicity. Vanessa Feltz was predictably marked down. Readers may be surprised that she was not marked down more for her emotional performance on Celebrity Big Brother, but some judges thought the whole thing an inspired piece of publicity that had put her on the map. That is always the problem with the celebrity world, where the only real crime is to be invisible. The judges were also split on the Welsh-abusing Anne Robinson and on whether it was a good thing for Guy Ritchie to be hailed by the press as a man content to be Mr Madonna (female judges thought it was not).

And the frontbenchers? Gordon Brown, almost inevitably, got the highest marks for his Budget, but lost a few points at the end of our judging period for being a friend of Geoffrey Robinson, who was under fire in the Daily Mail. Stephen Byers, however, scored highly for a rare display of ministerial backbone when he announced that he was prepared to sue the paper. Among the rest of the Cabinet, only Alan Milburn and Tony Blair scored significantly well. The latter deserves credit for getting the Sun's backing once again, while his admission in a Sunday Telegraph interview that he is now a convert to natural law was, in the judges' opinion, so silly as to be admirable. No frontbench Tory performed anything like well enough to get into the cabinet, although Francis Maude would do better if he stopped trying to look like Blair. Charles Kennedy was thought to have made insufficient impact at the Liberal Democrats' spring conference, while one judge pointed out that a fat lady had defected to the Tories, though other judges didn't know she had ever been a member. Menzies Campbell, however, got some credit for talking about the Balkans - unlike anybody on either the Labour or Tory front benches.

Nobody is sent off this week, but yellow cards for inactivity go to Jonathon Porritt and Robert Winston. If they again fail to register in the next judging round, they will be out of the game, like George Carey, Oliver Letwin and others dismissed in earlier weeks.

The winning cabinet (ie, the highest-scoring cabinet) from those submitted by entrants will be announced next week. Bonus points go to suggestions for Minister without Portfolio: John Pilger, Darren Gough, Ben Gill (National Farmers' Union), Bridget Jones and Socrates.

The chart above includes not only the scores for the past fortnight's performances, but a cumulative score for the four rounds of the game so far. The reader with the highest cumulative score when the game ends in May gets a grand prize, awarded in addition to the fortnightly prizes. We regret that no further entries to the game can be accepted.

To see the first judges' cabinet click here. To see the second judges' cabinet click here. To see the third judges' cabinet click here. To see the fourth judges' cabinet click here.