Our Great Britons of the Year

When historians look back on 2012, one Briton will define the year’s momentous and joyous events more than any other. The Queen not only celebrated her Diamond Jubilee, giving us all a reason to remind ourselves what is best about Britain, but also played a starring role in the opening ceremony of London 2012.

Who will ever forget the delicious moment when Her Majesty greeted James Bond at Buckingham Palace, before appearing to parachute out of a helicopter into the Olympic Park? Our Olympians and Paralympians may have given us a month’s worth of unashamed patriotism, but the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee was the culmination of a lifetime of service to the country.

At the centre of the celebrations were four remarkable days in June, during which the Queen defied age and the elements to attend the Thames Pageant, the splendidly over-the-top Jubilee Concert outside Buckingham Palace and a Service of Thanksgiving at St Paul’s, followed by a Carriage Procession and Balcony appearance. She had already taken on a daunting schedule of travel at the beginning of the year, as she set out to visit every corner of the United Kingdom, determined that as many of us as possible should see her in her landmark year; and she ended 2012 in the same spirit, shaking off a cold to lead her family to church on Christmas Day. Her Majesty has not only defined a year, but has helped shape an entire era, and for that she is our Greatest Briton.

The architect of Britain’s finest sporting year, Coe was the magician who made our summer. After an undistinguished second career in politics, he proved he was as world class a sports administrator as he had been a middle-distance runner. London’s Olympics was everything he promised and more: uplifting, exhilarating, inspiring; a unifying experience around which the entire nation could gather in patriotic delight. Coe did it by the simple leadership technique of delegation and trust, ceding responsibility to those he knew would produce. He did it so well that if, in mid August, there had been a popular vote for prime minister, he would have stormed to Number 10.

Loud, defiant, above all gloriously, tumultuously, spine-tinglingly British, Boyle’s Olympic opening ceremony was 90 minutes of dazzling theatre, dance, film and music, a mash-up of our nation’s cultural history delivered at breakneck speed. Warm, witty and full of surprises, it spun the head, brought a tear to the eye and made everyone lucky enough to witness it smile hard and long. Never mind that many of the cultural references went way over the heads of those watching in Milwaukee (who is this Michael Fish guy?), Boyle’s was precisely the vision of Britain we wanted projected to the world.

What a year it has been for the Mayor of London. His second-term victory over Ken Livingstone in the spring proved he is the Conservative best able to reach parts closed to other Tories. In doing so, he scared the life out of David Cameron, who regards Boris as his greatest rival in the party — and a steady stream of robust views emanating from City Hall on Europe, infrastructure planning and the economy did nothing to shake that perception. Most of all, Boris was the international face of London throughout one of the city’s most memorable years. His contribution to the capital’s annus mirabilis has guaranteed his place in the pantheon of the capital’s great figures, the Dick Whittington of his day.

Not content with giving birth to her fourth child and dressing every A-lister with a red carpet-worthy body, Stella McCartney designed the kit for the whole of Team GB. Well, almost all the team. The equestrians stuck to their traditional jackets and jodhpurs, although McCartney, a keen horsewoman, was permitted to tinker with their horses’ rugs. After the Olympics, she snagged two gongs for herself at the British Fashion Awards in November, including the biggie, Designer of the Year. “When I resigned from Chloé more than a decade ago, the boss told me that no woman had ever built a successful British fashion brand. That only made me more determined,“ she said, in the best girl-power acceptance speech of the year.

The defining genius behind Britain’s rise to the top of the cycling world, Brailsford is the master of micro-management. Nothing was left to chance as he co-ordinated a double assault on the roads of France and the Olympic velodrome. His brilliant stewardship seeks out advantage in the smallest detail: when his riders hit the start line they know they are better prepared, better trained, better equipped than any of their rivals. Then they know it is up to them to deliver. And deliver they did – to the point where Wiggins, Hoy, Pendleton and Trott have become household names. But all of them acknowledge the chief reason behind their success.

The woman who based television’s most hapless heroine on herself – in her sitcom Miranda – has had an amazing 2012. She was one of the most-loved stars of Call the Midwife, the BBC’s most successful new drama in a decade, playing upper-class fish-out-of-water “Chummy” Browne in London’s deprived East End in the Fifties. She wrote a bestseller, Is It Just Me?, which offered her thoughts on subjects as diverse as how to sit elegantly on a bar stool and mothers who call their children names like Bruschetta, Vinaigrette and Focaccia. And on Boxing Day, her sitcom, which has reminded millions of viewers just how much they prefer slapstick and silliness to cruel comedy, began its third series on BBC One. For Miranda Hart, this has unarguably been a – what I call – great year.

Just occasionally, critics get it disastrously wrong. And the best example this year was David Hockney’s exhibition at the Royal Academy, in which he returned to his native county of Yorkshire to work in that most old-fashioned of genres, landscape. Art critic Brian Sewell threw up his hands in horror at Hockney’s colourful, joyful paintings and deplored their “ghastly gaudiness”. But the public adored them and flocked there in droves – with 650,000 visitors, it looks likely to have been the RA’s best attended show of the year. Later there was an outcry when one of the trees featured in the paintings was vandalised. Hockney has always defiantly gone his own way (not least in his defence of smoking). This year he showed, at the age of 75, that he still has the power to confound expectations.

“Why build a massive project around an ugly Tudor politician, condemned by posterity as a corrupt torturer?” This was the rhetorical question Hilary Mantel posed as she looked back over her immersion in the life of Thomas Cromwell. Having partly answered the question with Wolf Hall, which won the Booker Prize in 2009, she closed the discussion with the sequel Bring Up the Bodies, which won this year’s Booker, making her the first Briton – and the first woman – to win the prize twice. The great news for her devoted readers was that since the second book covered the events of only nine months, there must be a third, dealing with Cromwell’s demise. Bring on The Mirror and the Light.

Seven months ago, Martha Payne was an ordinary nine-year-old from a tiny Scottish village – Lochgilphead in Argyll and Bute – who started a blog about her unhealthy school meals. When the local council banned Martha from taking photographs in her canteen, she made headlines across the world and gained millions of fans, including Jamie Oliver, who campaigned to get her blog back online. To date, it has been read nine million times, raising ￡125,500 for the charity Mary’s Meals. In October, Martha visited the school kitchen in Blantyre, Malawi, which was built with money donated by her fans. “Bad things can sometimes turn into good things,” she says. “I am glad I didn’t give up.”