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From The Times

December 12, 2009

50 People of the Decade

A panel of Times editors and contributors nominate the personalities who, for better or worse, have shaped our world over the past ten years

(Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty)

More than 270 nominations, 21 judges, 1 runaway winner... Ben Macintyre reflects on our People of the Decade poll and what it reveals about the concerns and obsessions of our age, while Alan Franks and other members of the voting panel profile a formidable who’s who

We were asked to choose the people of the decade. Not the best people, mind. But the most important, influential and interesting people. Some of those who scored highly were role models, men and women of high virtue and accomplishment. Some were stinkers. A few were actually criminals and mass murderers.

The surprising thing about the winner, Barack Obama, is not that so many of us voted for him, but that one didn’t. (I have my suspicions: Caitlin, you are a subversive.)

It is also a measure of the speed of news, and the length of our attention spans, that a man overwhelmingly voted the most important person at the end of the decade was unknown to almost all of us at the start of it.

This was the decade when internet technology came to define our world: the entrepreneurs behind Apple, Google, Facebook, YouTube and Amazon all appear in the Top 25, but only one writer, one chef and two sportsmen. We rate our technology gurus, broadly speaking, above our politicians.

Our definition of what is important is limitlessly wide: J.K. Rowling is just one place above Osama bin Laden, which may be the first time these two have ever sat together in the same sentence. The Queen, a household name if ever there were one, polls fewer votes than Banksy, who remains nameless.

Celebrity is another defining feature of the decade. Fame for achievement – sporting, scientific, artistic – but also fame for the sake of fame, people who, in the strange self-replicating science of 21st-century celebrity, are celebrated simply because they are well known: Katie Price, Jade Goody, arguably Damien Hirst and Amy Winehouse. Simon Cowell polls more votes than Tony Blair.

Our television culture, to judge by the list, seems firmly focused on the US: the makers of no less than four American television series – The Wire,The Sopranos, West Wing and Lost – were cited by at least one panellist as people of the decade. But in our actors we are more patriotic: Ricky Gervais received more votes than any other actor, while Helen Mirren was the highest-polling actress. Five sportsmen and women make it into the Top 50, two pop singers, and two television celebrities, but only one adult novelist (generously defined): Dan Brown.

Ours is a secular and scientific age. Richard Dawkins, the outspoken defender of evolutionary science against creationism, is in the Top 10 with J. Craig Venter and Francis Collins, the human genome pioneers. The only religious figure to receive any votes at all was Pope Benedict XVI, who scored two.

In sum, then, to judge from this unscientific but intensely argued poll of Times folk and contributors, the Noughties was a decade fascinated by the internet and reality television, in which sportsmen and politicians vied for our attention – and we watched a great deal of American TV. If our heroes reflected our interest in science and celebrity, our villains also echoed the preoccupations of the age: terrorism (Osama bin Laden) and crooked business (Bernie Madoff).

But perhaps most striking of all is the sheer number of people voted for overall, and the breadth of the definition of what could be considered important and interesting. Twenty-one judges were asked to select 50 people: they came up with 272 names.

There are two conclusions to be drawn from this:

1. It was a richly varied decade.

2. No two Times writers will ever agree about anything.

The panel: David Aaronovitch, broadcaster and columnist; Lisa Armstrong, fashion editor; Joan Bakewell, broadcaster, columnist and czar for the elderly; Mark Borkowski, publicist; Robert Crampton, columnist; Matt Dickinson, chief sports correspondent; Celia Duncan, deputy editor, The Times Magazine; Daniel Finkelstein, chief leader writer; Alan Franks, author, playwright and feature writer; Simon Hills, associate editor, The Times Magazine; Ben Macintyre, author and columnist; Carol Midgley, columnist; Caitlin Moran, writer and columnist; Kate Muir, writer and author; Matthew Parris, columnist and broadcaster; Justine Roberts, co-founder, Mumsnet; David Rowan, editor, Wired; Tim Teeman, arts editor; Antonia Senior, editor, Eureka; Janice Turner, columnist; David Wighton, business editor.

The voting: Each of the 21 judges was asked to name their Top 50 People of the Decade; these were then combined to produce a long list and the votes aggregated to give rankings. In the case of collective achievements, these nominees count as just one vote.

1. BARACK OBAMA First black President of the United States

In 1963, Democrat George Wallace was sworn in as Governor of Alabama. He proclaimed his devotion to racial segregation, standing on the spot where, a century earlier, Jefferson Davis had been sworn in as President of the Confederate States of America. In 2008, Alabama Democrats supported an African-American as the next President of the United States.

That is one measure of Barack Obama’s achievement as the first man of his race to occupy the White House, a building partly constructed by slaves. But there is more. The President overturned two other laws of American politics. The first was that a liberal Northern Senator could not triumph. Obama’s stillness, his coolness, his personal magnetism dispelled fears. It made him seem a moderate, and made attacks on his liberalism appear to be scaremongering.

The second was the hegemony of the Clintons. With an almost impossibly skilled campaign, very much driven by him, Obama harnessed the enthusiasm of youth against the Clinton machine. Alongside his brilliant handling of the race issue, his use of social media will for ever change US campaigns.

Obama’s victory was, therefore, both extraordinary and transformative, changing assumptions about American culture and politics. He may not prove to be the man of the next decade. He was certainly the man of this one. Daniel Finkelstein

2. SIMON COWELL TV mogul and music impresario

The biggest British TV show of the Noughties – The X Factor – might often come across like some tabloid steamroller slice of primetime Vegas, but what, at heart, is it? Essentially, a gigantic exercise in market research.

Simon Cowell’s genius was to work out that, as illegal downloading laid waste to the music industry, whoever was still paying for music would now have to pay at least twice as much for it, in order to keep him in £7 Mr Topper haircuts, Cuban-heeled shoes and black toilet paper. Therefore – a TV talent show! Made by his production company (additional fee for Simon), in which the weekly phone vote means the public firstly pay Cowell to tell him which act they like, and then later pay again actually to own the winning record. Consequently, Cowell has found a way to make signing acts in an industry recession virtually risk-free.

In the process, he has created television that unites the nation. We enjoy it because – as countless rock biopics have illustrated – it’s the early years of an artist’s life that are the interesting bit: the struggle to find out who they are and have that first big hit. It all gets a bit dull, with concept albums and overdoses after that. Cowell has realised this, and created one of British TV’s biggest exports. His minting of the Britain/America’s Got Talent and X Factor franchises has done to the music industry what Elaine suggested doing in Seinfeld, when she pointed out that, really, you only want to eat the top half of a muffin (six weeks of Jedward arsing around), and that shops should simply give you that, and throw the bottom half (any thought of a long-term career for them) into the pig bucket. Caitlin Moran

3. TONY BLAIR Former Prime Minister

Loathe him, love him (in America, anyway), but there’s still no ignoring him: Labour’s longest-serving Prime Minister, in office from the spring of 1997 to the summer of 2007, defined the political landscape of the decade. The only leader of his party to have won three general elections in succession, he shifted the centre of British politics. But the war in Iraq left a hugely controversial legacy.

4 FRANCIS COLLINS AND J. CRAIG VENTER Human genome pioneers

Venter is the US biologist who got private sector funding in order to speed up the progress of the Human Genome Project. With geneticist and physician Francis Collins of the National Institute of Health, he announced the mapping of the genome in 2000, three years ahead of the state programme, and thus fast-tracked vital medical research.

5 RICHARD DAWKINS Academic and writer

Britain’s leading atheist, with a zeal more often found in the ardent believer. Cautionary voice in an age of increasing fundamentalism. His unlikely 2006 global bestseller The God Delusion castigated the negative influence of religion on human behaviour. He’s the co-founder of the OUT Campaign, which champions atheism.

6 J.K. ROWLING Author and philanthropist

Although the Boy Wizard first appeared in the late Nineties, it was in the Noughties that J.K. Rowling became a Muggle of international renown, when the first novel in the series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, was released as a film in 2001. By the time the seventh and final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, appeared, Rowling had sold 400 million books in 67 languages. Child readers became teenagers along with Harry, Ron and Hermione.

An unwitting populariser of witchcraft and boarding schools, Rowling agreed to her publisher’s request to use initials of indeterminate sex so the name “Joanne” would not put off boy fans, and she controlled her burgeoning £4 billion franchise with an iron hand. She oversaw the film scripts, insisted on a British cast and tearfully defended herself in court when another author threatened to publish a Potter “Lexicon”. Rowling has successfully stayed out of the public eye by never courting personal publicity, and has two children with her second husband. The Sunday Times Rich List estimated Rowling’s personal fortune at £560 million, ranking her as the 12th richest woman in Britain. She gives £5 million a year to her charity, which supports many causes including one-parent families, which she herself was when she wrote the first Potter in an Edinburgh café with her baby at her side. Kate Muir

7 OSAMA BIN LADEN Leader of al-Qaeda

Bin Laden is the foremost ogre of the first decade of the 21st century, a symbol of horror to the West, an icon of defiance to some Islamists, a pin-up, a fugitive and a killer.

His face is possibly more widely known than any other on the planet, yet he remains elusive, unrepentant and uncaught: the evil Pimpernel.

Although the so-called war against terror has evolved dramatically in the last decade, he remains the poster boy for terrorism, a convenient shorthand for all that is violent and fanatical in Islam.

Some 24 video or audio recordings purporting to be from Osama bin Laden have been released since 2001, repeated reminders that he, the al-Qaeda network and their brand of Islamist violence remain at large.

The first of these, three months after the destruction of the World Trade Centre, appeared to take responsibility for (and pride in) that atrocity. One of the most recent, last January, claimed the global financial crisis had exposed the fragility and waning influence of the United States.

Bin Laden’s whereabouts remain unknown, yet he never goes away. In that sense, he has been perhaps the ultimate antihero for the past decade: omnipresent but invisible, kept potent by a sinister brew of technology, myth and fear. Ben Macintyre

8 LARRY PAGE AND SERGEY BRIN Founders of Google

The Noughties saw the rapid intensification of the knowledge revolution that began in the late 20th century. The name most associated with this process was Google, as in Google Search (or “googling”), Google Earth, Google Street View, Google Books and a dozen other Google offshoots that are used by hundreds of millions of people across the globe every day. The creators of Google, Page and Brin, founded the search engine when students at Stanford University; they registered the domain in 1997, incorporated the company in 1998, and have since gone on to realise much of their historically incredible mission “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. The scope of their ambition and the intensely democratic nature of its part-realisation have changed the world.

To be sure, in the process they have attracted criticism for their accommodations with freedom-averse governments, and for grabbing information and resource to make it first their own, and second that of anyone who might use their services. But these are cavils set against the scale of their contribution. In 100 years they will rank alongside Caxton and Gutenberg in the shortlist of those who took knowledge outside the offices and cloisters of the priesthoods and into the demos. David Aaronovitch

9 MARK ZUCKERBERG Founder of Facebook

Remember the days when you’d go to the pub to catch up with your mates? Maybe you’d pass round some photos from a night out and have a good laugh?

And then came Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, and all of a sudden you can keep in touch without lifting more than a couple of fingers. Can’t be bothered to lick all those Christmas card envelopes? Change your Facebook status: “NameHere hopes everyone has a very Merry Christmas.” Pregnant? Just ping up a scan: “NameHere is pregnant.”

Facebook, through its effortless efficiency as a virtual meeting place, has allowed us all to have more and more friends to intermittently poke, tickle or zombify. You can know exactly what everyone got up to at the weekend merely by logging in on a Monday morning – you don’t actually have to see anyone.

And it’s definitely Facebook where people want to stay in touch – Zuckerberg has outflanked great rival MySpace by providing a clean site which draws on the expertise of its user base and the wider tech community to develop user applications. In five years, it has become the biggest social network and the fourth biggest website in the world, and it’s still adding users at a frightening pace.

All of which is really not too bad for a 25-year-old who says he merely gives his customers what they want. What’s he going to do in his thirties, I wonder? Justine Roberts

10 DAVID BECKHAM Footballer

Great triumphs and the odd disaster – and that’s just been his haircuts. “A rollercoaster ride” is how David Beckham recently described his career, and it has been a compelling journey to share this last decade as it has lurched between Manchester, Madrid and now Los Angeles and Milan.

True, other sportsmen accomplished more. Usain Bolt rewrote our ideas of how fast a human can run; Jonny Wilkinson won a World Cup; Zinedine Zidane actually was the footballer that Beckham aspired to be.

But these are mere quibbles. By inviting us to ponder his tattoos, his ever-changing fashions, the unusual names of his children, Beckham never limited his ambitions to on-field achievements.

Together with his wife, he made Brand Beckham one of Britain’s most successful exports. Iconic status around the globe was his goal, and who can doubt that he has succeeded?

On the way, there were fights with Sir Alex Ferguson, a love-in with Sven-Göran Eriksson, banishment under Steve McClaren.

More than once we thought it was all over, but Beckham loves nothing more than a comeback – and we start the next decade poised to witness another. England go to the World Cup – will Beckham or won’t he? The wise money says that he will. That handsome face masks an extraordinary tenacity. Matt Dickinson

11 GEORGE W. BUSH Former President of the United States

From his narrow and contentious victory over Al Gore at the start of the decade, Bush was never going to be the most popular president in history. But no one knew then quite how far he would fall from grace in the eyes of the world and much of the American public. His post-9/11 emphasis on the Axis of Evil and US military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq defined a new world order, one that will play out into the next decade and beyond.

12 VLADIMIR PUTIN Prime Minister of Russia

The motherland loves a strong man, and they certainly got one in Putin. Boris Yeltsin’s very different successor restored Russia’s economy and got it back on to the world stage with the help of the rising prices of its main exports, oil and gas. Uncompromising in his attitude to the West, he is now technically a back-seat driver to President Medvedev after completing the maximum two four-year terms – a back-seat driver with a very loud voice.

13 JAMIE OLIVER Chef and campaigner

I’m not surprised that Jamie Oliver has emerged as one of the most significant people of the decade – he has the public’s confidence and has moved the whole culture of celebrity chefdom into a new zone with his passionate belief in food and health.

He’s achieved this because he is who he is: a decent chef with a genuine streak of cheeky Essex chappie, who loathes Turkey Twizzlers and all who sail in their trans-fat wake. And he has an effortless ability to prime a public conversation. Where others use stunts for leverage to get their brand noticed, Oliver sets new standards by transparently being himself. His language, the matey earnestness of his message, and the fact that he has come from nowhere and has no hidden agenda, are more than enough to endear him to the public. He’s even survived promoting Sainsbury’s, which says a lot for the affection people have for him.

For a boy who was dyslexic and left school at 16 with no qualifications, Oliver, still only 34, has achieved great things. Now he’s taking his healthy eating message to America: will they lap it up? Mark Borkowski

14 BANKSY Artist

Banksy, the anonymous graffiti artist, rose without establishment help over the decade to become the people’s painter, his black and white rats and gun-toting panda becoming popular icons. His success as a street artist, making stealth attacks on walls, eventually transferred into commercial success, and one of his paintings sold for £288,000 at auction in 2007. This year, his native Bristol offered him the City Museum & Art Gallery for an exhibition, and Banksy installed 100 of his own works, as well as subverting the permanent installations. The show was a massive success, with 300,000 visitors. As the artist himself wrote: “When you go to an art gallery you are simply a tourist looking at the trophy cabinet of a few millionaires.”

Banksy’s major works can be seen on walls everywhere from Brick Lane to Camden, from New Orleans post-hurricane to Israel’s West Bank. His graffiti combines humour and political point-scoring, and is done with stencils for speed to avoid arrest. Many of his works have been lost to officious council clean-ups – Westminster Council removed his “One Nation Under CCTV” in 2008. Banksy’s art is regularly reproduced without credit on T-shirts, and his kissing policemen image is now in high-street card shops. Kate Muir

15 STEVE JOBS Co-founder and CEO of Apple

If you want to be inspired, go online and watch Steve Jobs’s commencement address to Stanford University students from June 2005. Jobs recounts his remarkable personal journey, from unwanted baby sent out for adoption by his mother, via college dropout surviving on collecting the deposits from discarded Coke cans, to public humiliation on being fired from the company to which he had devoted his life.

In the meantime, of course, he had built up that company, Apple, from a garage start-up to a $2 billion business (£1.2 billion) in a decade, gone on to buy Pixar, which then made the first computer-animated feature film, and reinvented our expectations of music players, mobile phones and – give it a few months – elegant electronic-book readers.

It’s a journey that has brought this famously secretive creative genius close to death, which he acknowledged in that speech, when he told his young audience: “Stay hungry, stay foolish... Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.” By living his own professional life without compromise, with a relentless quest for perfection, Jobs has not always been the easiest boss. But his creative brilliance has turned cold technology into something for which today’s consumer can feel emotion – even love. David Rowan

16 TIGER WOODS Golfer

Almost got to the end of the decade without a mark on him, then all hell let loose with his car crash and allegations of a string of affairs. His position in our list might have been very different had voting taken place a week later. Still, the sporting superlatives remain: world No 1 golfer, only 33 but within sight of Jack Nicklaus’s Majors record; highest paid sportsman last year, with reported earnings of $110 million(£66 million); PGA player of the year a record nine times. Credited with having raised the popularity – and the prize money – of golf.

17 JEFF BEZOS Founder of Amazon

Created the online giant that revolutionised the buying and selling of books and has since moved into CDs, video games, clothes, furniture and much besides. Started his company in a suburban Seattle garage. Now the most popular music and video retailer in Britain, and the biggest online seller in the States.

18 DAVID SIMON Creator of The Wire

The Wire is acclaimed so fiercely by its fans that if you reveal you haven’t watched it to someone who has, you can expect to be grabbed by the lapels and forcibly instructed to invest in a boxed set as soon as possible. It may not command huge audiences, but its approbation by critics has made it an instant, and influential, classic.

The Baltimore-set detectives-and-druglords show has the gritty tang of authenticity because David Simon, its creator, worked as a crime reporter at The Baltimore Sun from 1983 to 1995, before writing about the harsh landscape of his day job in his first book, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (which mutated into the TV show, Homicide: Life on the Street).

He has set his latest TV show, Generation Kill, further afield. Like The Wire, its stories unfurl slowly alongside his characters’ meandering interactions – surprising given that they are soldiers participating in the invasion of Iraq in 2003, so the temptation for loud melodrama and whiz-bang pyrotechnics must be high.

Simon is reportedly planning dramas about post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans and Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth. They may not be set in Baltimore, but the Simon trademark – the tricksy, nuanced, slowburn unfolding of characters and situations – will most likely endure. Tim Teeman

19 DAMIEN HIRST Artist

Slated recently for a derivative foray into painting, Hirst was the original YBA, who personified everything great and awful about Brit Art. As famous for his commercial nous as his clever way with formaldehyde, his fame was a key factor in the millennial image of Cool Britannia. Charles Saatchi called him a genius, the critic Robert Hughes “tacky”.

20 ANGELA MERKEL German Chancellor

Ranked by many polls as the most powerful woman in the world since becoming Germany’s first female Chancellor 4 years ago, the 55-year-old Christian Democrat is often compared with her fellow science graduate, Margaret Thatcher. Has not only consolidated her hold over her own country, but over Europe as well. Little concerned with charisma, she compares her economic programme to that of a Swabian housewife.

21 DAVID CHASE Creator of The Sopranos

At the helm of the most commercially successful cable TV series, a show widely praised for its craftsmanship. The 64-year-old has written and directed for 30 years, but the 86 episodes about the work/life balance of mobster and family man Tony Soprano are his crowning achievement.

22 SACHA BARON COHEN Comedian, writer and actor

Brilliantly subversive, he made a name for himself with the irreverent celebrity interviews conducted by his boorish, faux black Ali G character. Cornered the market for inventive tastelessness with his 2006 movie Borat, and this year maintained his flair for offence with Brüno, a film about a gay Austrian fashion show frontman. He has effectively created a whole new genre.

23 AMY WINEHOUSE Singer/songwriter

Amy Winehouse is an icon of the decade for the best and worst of reasons. Blessed with a breathtakingly beautiful voice she is also cursed with a monstrously ugly capacity to self-destruct. She is a living contradiction, an authentic tortured genius, the beehived real deal who does not just sing about emotional pain, but lives it before our very eyes like a slow-mo car crash.

Her body – track-marked, bloodied, hollow-eyed – is the antithesis of the bland, buff-bodied boy bands that fill the charts, yet she provides the most musical nourishment. She might be slight and have 70 per cent lung capacity due to emphysema, but she can still out-sing them all, including, ironically, the ultra-healthy Madonna. That she can be so admired yet ruin herself with drugs, alcohol and self-harm makes her a pin-up for genuine emotional vulnerability.

But while she may have blemished a decade whose drug habit made the Sixties look chaste, Winehouse is also alien to it. Not for her the smug spreads in Hello!. Her husband (now her ex) was in jail and the photographs that made the papers were of her blackened fingernails, deadened eyes and bloodied ballet pumps. Frame by frame we saw her heart breaking.

Her 2006 album, Back to Black, was voted No 2 in a recent poll of the best albums of the Noughties. Some believe it should have been No 1, because undoubtedly hers was the voice of the decade, and we have thus far seen only a fraction of her talent. Carol Midgley

24 JADE GOODY Reality TV star

Embodiment of the decade’s capacity for manufacturing fame, Goody rose to prominence in Big Brother 3 before becoming a household name in the Celebrity Big Brother house in 2007 after her allegedly racist taunting of Indian actress Shilpa Shetty. Eighteen months later, Goody was at the centre of her own very publicly played-out tragedy, when she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. She died in March this year, aged 27. Death, many felt, was her finest hour.

25 THE QUEEN

An odd choice for this columnist, because I’m not really a monarchist – but the Queen has won me over. I join those millions of Britons who are not so much monarchists as Elizabethists.

Why? Hard-working, gracious, courteous, conscientious, well-judged, dignified, steadfast, “in it for life”? If the words and phrases have become clichés, it’s only because they express thoughts so widely shared that we have nothing left to say about her, except that we respect her tremendously for these qualities – qualities exemplified throughout a decade when they have sometimes seemed in short supply in the ranks of the powerful, famous or grand.

But I would add two thoughts. First, in an age when everyone is supposed to emote, preferably in public, the Queen has shown that most unfashionable of qualities: reserve. No tears, no confessions, not even much public laughter – and no interviews. Her subjects understand and admire this more, perhaps, than the media do. To combine such a sense of privacy with so terrifyingly public a role shows some kind of genius of self-possession.

My second thought may sound strange. We do not know, and never will, whether the Queen actually enjoys being a monarch. She betrays no sense that she gets any kind of a kick out of her status. I would mistrust anyone who really wanted to rule. The Queen rules because she must: it is her duty, and sometimes a painful one. I admire this more than I can say. Matthew Parris

26 AL GORE Politician and environmentalist

He started the decade as an also-ran, and ended it as one of the world’s most influential thinkers. Few would have predicted at the beginning of the decade, when Gore limped out of the 2000 presidential race, that he would emerge as a green guru.

His reinvention as the high priest of climate change activism began with the 2006 film, An Inconvenient Truth. You could argue that few events in cultural history have changed the world so profoundly. Gore’s political clout and wide appeal, coupled with a stark warning about man’s hurtle towards doom, wrested the green movement from the fringes. Sometimes controversial, always compelling, An Inconvenient Truth took the climate change agenda into the mainstream, and on to manifestos.

He has ended the decade with a new twist, turning from doom-monger to optimist. In his new book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, Gore sets out a blueprint to avoid Armageddon. He argues that a new vision of capital markets and a sustainable form of capitalism will pull us back from the brink.

Born in 1948, he served in Vietnam and worked as a journalist before joining Congress at the age of 28. He served as Vice President from 1993 to 2001 and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. Antonia Senior

27 STEVE CHEN, CHAD HURLEY AND JAWED KARIM Founders of YouTube

Created the phenomenon that is YouTube, through which users download and share clips from TV, films and concerts as well as upload their own footage. The trio were working for PayPal in 2005, when Hurley and Chen reportedly thought up the idea as they discussed the problems they had sharing videos of a dinner party at Chen’s San Francisco flat. The following year YouTube was bought by Google for $1.65 billion. Said to get one billion views a day.

28 PHILIP GREEN Businessman

One of most audacious retailers of the decade, with a £5 billion fortune that makes him Britain’s ninth richest man. Famously rewarded himself in 2005 with a £1.2 billion dividend from Arcadia, the retail giant he had bought three years earlier. A flair for striking friendships with bankers and Kate Moss alike has propelled the abrasive 57-year-old to the top of the high street.

29 RICKY GERVAIS Comedian and actor

So-called saviour of British comedy. Most famous for his embarrassing antihero David Brent in The Office, a landmark TV series about a perky corporate loser in Slough. Wince-inducing English humour at its self-mocking best. The Americans loved it and put him into their films. Despite the excellent Extras series, his forays into Hollywood have been less rapturously received.

30 USAIN BOLT Athlete

Fastest human runner on the planet, world record holder at 100m, 200m and, with his Jamaican team-mates, the 4 x 100m relay. Seemingly unbeatable, Bolt is a 6ft 5in, drug-free competitor with as magnificent a stride as has ever graced the track.

31 ZAHA HADID Architect

First woman to win the coveted Pritzker Architecture Prize. The 59-year-old Baghdad-born creator of radically modern, curvaceous designs deploys her formidable will to translate the vision to visibility. The world awaits her striking Aquatics Centre for the 2012 Olympics.

32 ANTONY GORMLEY Artist

British sculptor most famous for his Angel of the North in Gateshead, Gormley specialises in placing human figures in landscape. This year’s work, One & Other, went a stage further and invited the public to spend one hour on the vacant plinth in Trafalgar Square. The project was mentioned in The Archers, and Gormley later appeared on the programme as himself, opening the Ambridge summer fête.

33 BERNIE MADOFF Fraudster

It was a vintage decade for fraud, ranging from Enron and WorldCom to the accusations against Sir Allen Stanford. All were eclipsed by Bernard Madoff, whose $65 billion investment scam ranks as the biggest fraud of all time. Hundreds of investors were ruined, several driven to suicide. Victims included director Steven Spielberg, Jewish charities, and fellow members of Florida’s Palm Beach Country Club. Madoff, 71, was sentenced to 150 years in jail in June, after admitting to a decades-long Ponzi scheme. Investors were lured in by faked high returns, and when they wanted to withdraw money were paid with cash from new investors. It is believed that $21.2 billion of investors’ money has been lost. In an era when hedge funds were making fortunes from arcane trading strategies, many did not question Madoff’s implausibly consistent returns. It helped that he was a respected Wall Street figure who once served as chairman of the Nasdaq stock market, though some big Wall Street firms refused to deal with him because they could find no evidence he was investing any money. Madoff was investigated several times by the US authorities and said it was “amazing” they did not discover the fraud before: “I wish they caught me six years ago.” David Wighton

34 AUNG SAN SUU KYI Pro-democracy leader

Enduring symbol of peaceful resistance to oppression. The detention of the 64-year-old leader of Burma’s National League for Democracy party continues. Winner of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize, she has spent more than 11 of the past 19 years under some form of imprisonment.

35 WARREN BUFFETT Investor

World’s richest man in 2008, according to Forbes, now down to second place with a fortune of $40 billion. Known as the Oracle of Omaha because the Nebraska town is home to his holding company, the philanthropist, 79, is considered the most successful investor in history. The trick? To buy securities whose shares appear undervalued when they are subjected to detailed analysis.

36 MICHAEL O'LEARY Founder of Ryanair

O’Leary has introduced a whole new way of flying. Outspoken, brash and brazenly politically incorrect, he garners publicity by announcements such as the airline charging extra for overweight passengers or for using lavatories. But his low-cost model – online checking-in only, new planes which have seats that don’t recline to save money, pilots paying for their own training – has made Ryanair the largest airline in Europe with 202 aircraft on 800-plus routes from 32 bases.

37 ALEX FERGUSON Manager of Manchester United

After 23 years at Old Trafford, the tirelessly ambitious and astute Scot, now 67, has steered United to continuous domestic and European glory, and been named Manager of the Year nine times. His hallmark is a blend of daunting toughness and keen human insight.

38 MALCOLM GLADWELL Author

New York-based controversialist spawned a generation of imitators with his seminal 2000 book, The Tipping Point. He became as famous as his subjects with the publication of his bestselling examination of success, Outliers, in 2008, and went on a rock star-type tour. Never was social science so sexy.

39 OPRAH WINFREY Broadcaster and media mogul

When Barack Obama made his election night speech, Oprah Winfrey was listening in the Chicago crowd. His victory is inconceivable without not only Oprah’s explicit support but her decades of groundwork, presenting racially divided America with a black face on which it could project its aspirations, trust and love.

Hers is that most American of lives, a miniseries story arc from rural poverty and childhood neglect to adulation as a global brand, the world’s first black woman billionaire. Oprah’s success came from a rare pairing of talents: emotional integrity and business foresight. When her chat-show format was copied and curdled by the likes of Jerry Springer, Oprah moved upmarket.

Her willingness to find universal messages in her own bumpy life story – not least her yo-yo weight – brought the show, at its peak, 33 million viewers. And thus Oprah could gently pull Middle America towards more progressive views, particularly regarding homosexuality and HIV.

Oprah made the cultural weather, her self-help doctrine conquered every market, her opinion created a bestseller, forged or broke a reputation. And finally she made a President. Now, as the decade ends, so will her show, but with the launch of the Oprah Winfrey Network, her power will only continue to soar. Janice Turner

40 KATIE PRICE Model, reality TV star and businesswoman

This is a woman who is beyond embarrassment, modesty or taste. She began as a topless model, now lays claim to be a businesswoman, broadcaster and writer. She has carved out a reputation and a fortune for herself, which makes her a role model for thousands of younger women. She is the apotheosis of fame and money: the sheer bravura of it commands respect.

She is the quintessence of “chav” with a healthy disregard for those who would pass judgment. When the stuffed shirts of the Guards Polo Club refused her admission to their most prestigious event, she bought a marquee table for £6,000. They still kept her out. She represents a generation of young women unfazed by matters of class, and happy to claim whatever money will buy.

Her television programmes are mesmerising in their frankness and directness. Only Tracey Emin matches her willingness to expose everything about herself. Her body is a construct, so was her marriage, her books and her career. She is intelligent, focused and remorseless. I understand why Martin Amis is fascinated by her. Joan Bakewell

41DAN BROWN Author

The Da Vinci Code has become one of the most successful novels ever written, with sales of more than 80 million copies. The 45-year-old son of a maths professor wanted the book to serve as a catalyst for an exploration of faith. He traces his love of sums, ciphers and puzzles to the elaborate treasure hunts devised for him by his father.

42 JACK DORSEY, BIZ STONE AND EVAN WILLIAMS Founders of Twitter

Put simply, they have revolutionised personal communication online. The 140-character limit has spawned a vocabulary of abbreviations. The messages – tweets – have proved valuable in disasters and military emergencies, and are becoming as important for grassroots political dissent (Iran) as for relaying trivia by celebrities (Stephen Fry).

43 KATE MOSS Supermodel

At the start of the decade, Kate Moss was another 26-year-old model approaching her sell-by date. A stint at the Priory in 1998, where she was treated for “exhaustion” after breaking up with Johnny Depp, and her confessional candour in two post-rehab interviews in Vogue and The Face in which she revealed that she’d never walked down a catwalk sober, suggested a vulnerable young woman about to be spat out by the fashion industry. But that was before we knew about her indomitable spirit, her steely determination and her extraordinary constitution.

Ten years on, she has trampled on the concept of sell-by dates, created a high-street brand in her own image, refused to conform to anything resembling a little Englander mentality (while being quintessentially English), spawned an entire Mossian genre of dressing and learnt never to give interviews.

A classless, Rabelaisian doll, she’s one of the all-time great models with a talent for spectacular hell-raising. The resulting scandals culminated in some of the decade’s enduring images – Cocaine Kate on her way to Scotland Yard in trench coat and oversized sunglasses – and made lots of newspapers lots of money. By rights, we should all be over her by now; God knows we’ve anointed plenty of new It girls. Yet she remains a lightning rod for society’s anxieties. Somehow, there’s no one else quite like her. Lisa Armstrong

44 HELEN MIRREN Actress

Unlike many people in this list, Dame Helen Mirren could conceivably have been featured in a similar one for the Nineties, the Eighties, maybe even the Seventies. She’s been a top British actress for a long time. But then again, it’s only in this decade that she has finally matured into a global star. The reason for that is The Queen, Mirren’s 2006 portrayal of Elizabeth II during the extraordinary week following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997.

Mirren’s superlative performance won her an Oscar and a new, wider audience in the USA. She went from being close to the top of the British acting tree, a stalwart in medium-sized movies such as Calendar Girls, to not too far off the top of the Hollywood acting tree, or at least that branch reserved for actresses no longer in the first flush of youth.

The other key moment in Mirren’s decade, the one that confirmed a shift from mere popularity to iconic status, was the publication, in the summer of 2008, of a photograph of her looking sensational in a bikini at 63. It is no exaggeration to say that decades-old ideas concerning female sexuality and age shifted right there and then. Robert Crampton

45 ALAN GREENSPAN Economist

The world’s “second most powerful man” as chairman of the United States Federal Reserve Board from 1987 to 2006 helped shape the economic destiny of America under Presidents Reagan, Bushes Sr and Jr and Clinton. From the turbulence of the dot-com bubble and the post-9/11 slump to the US housing boom that eventually fuelled the credit crunch, Greenspan has been the man who’s been at the heart of the economic strategies of the decade.

46 ANDREW FLINTOFF Cricketer

Freddie was an indispensable member of the England cricket team during a decade of great highs and dismal lows. Despite being plagued by injury, the big Lancashire all-rounder appeared in 79 Tests, scoring nearly 4,000 runs and taking 226 wickets, and played a huge part in two Ashes wins. One of the decade’s great living Englishmen.

47 ELLEN MACARTHUR Yachtswoman

World-beating lone sailor from landlocked Derbyshire. Her enthusiasm was sparked by Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons. Now 33 and based in Cowes, Dame Ellen gained international renown in 2005 when she broke the record for the fastest solo sail round the world. Now, with a new environmental campaign, she wants to save it.

48 SEBASTIAN COE Chair of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games

The Olympic hero started the decade by taking a life peerage in 2000, and in 2004 took over the role of chairman of the London bid to host the Olympics. No one thought the city would win, but on July 6, 2005, Trafalgar Square erupted as London’s triumph was announced. Coe’s role as a persuasive frontman for the bid was key, and while the 2012 Games have their critics, no one doubts they will transform a large tranche of the capital for ever.

49 ROMAN ABRAMOVICH Oligarch and owner of Chelsea FC

Russian oil and aluminium billionaire who has changed the face of British football during his six years at Chelsea. Until the recession, the second wealthiest person living in the UK, the 43-year-old has poured hundreds of millions into the club. Blamed for distorting the transfer market.

50 NICHOLAS HYTNER Director of the National Theatre

Overseer of a bright new age at the National Theatre with an artistic policy that mixes challenging new political drama with strong Bennett and Frayn premieres.

The other nominees: Roger Federer; Lucian Freud; Peter Bazalgette; George Clooney; Armando Iannucci; Peter Mandelson; Britney Spears; Larry David; Hillary Clinton; Beyoncé; Norman Foster; Lakshmi Mittal; Nicolas Sarkozy; Jonny Wilkinson; Anish Kapoor; Michael Grandage; Judi Dench; Daniel Craig; Philip Pullman; John Lasseter; Nick Park; Nicholas Serota; Damon Albarn; Bono; Jay-Z; Simon Rattle; Shinya Yamanaka and James Thomson; Paris Hilton; Jean Charles de Menezes; Michael Bloomberg; Hugo Chávez; Peter Tatchell; Neil MacGregor; Aaron Sorkin; Robert Peston; Hugh Laurie; Angelina Jolie; Jonathan Ross; Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond; Anna Wintour; Madonna; Alex Turner; Carlos Acosta; the Prince of Wales; Robert Mugabe; Dick Cheney; Martin Rees; Stephen Hawking; Fred Goodwin; Jonathan Ive; Tamara Mellon; Marc Jacobs; Tom Ford; Peter Jackson; Paul Abbott; Kate Winslet; Steve Redgrave; Cheryl Cole; Chris Martin; Kelly Holmes; Paula Radcliffe; David Attenborough; Heston Blumenthal; Brad Pitt; Tracey Emin; Silvio Berlusconi; Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; Richard Peto; David Kelly; Tom Anderson; Bernie Ecclestone; Arianna Huffington; Muhammad Yunus; Shami Chakrabarti; Graydon Carter; Chris Anderson; Alex Salmond; Evan Davis; Vince Cable; Saddam Hussein; Pope Benedict XVI; Andy Murray; Cristiano Ronaldo; José Mourinho; Zinedine Zidane; Thierry Henry; Ryan Giggs; Chris Hoy; Michael Schumacher; Victoria Beckham; Eminem; Kylie Minogue; Lily Allen; Gustavo Dudamel; Simon Fuller; Philip Seymour Hoffman; James Gandolfini; Joanna Lumley; Danny Boyle; Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner; Judd Apatow; Ben Stiller; Gordon Ramsay; Nigella Lawson; Zadie Smith; Jonathan Franzen; Sarah Waters; Manolo Blahnik; Guido Fawkes; Cath Kidston; Damilola Taylor; Ian Huntley; Josef Fritzl; Stelios Haji-Ioannou; Stuart Rose; Rudy Giuliani; Andrew Appleyard; the Duchess of Cornwall; Ratan Tata; Evan Williams; Pierre Omidyar; Eric Schmidt; Richard Branson; Bill Gates; Melinda Gates; Elon Musk; James Dyson; Johnson Beharry; Marcus du Sautoy; Susan Greenfield; Libby Heaney; Nicholas Stern; James Lovelock; Paul Krugman; Eliza Manningham-Buller; Tim Collins; Steve Squyres; David Remnick; Mark Frith; Max Clifford; Belle du Jour; David Cameron; George Osborne; Hans Blix; Ricky Ponting; Mahendra Singh Dhoni; Lewis Hamilton; Arsène Wenger; Michael Phelps; Ben Ainslie; Lance Armstrong; Christine Ohuruogu; Alison Balsom; Valery Gergiev; Luciano Pavarotti; Fiona Bruce; Andrew Sullivan; Matt Drudge; David Starkey; Radiohead; Girls Aloud; Rick Rubin; Jon Stewart; J.J. Abrams; Charlie Kaufman; Colin Firth; Heath Ledger; Tom Cruise; Jude Law; Matt Damon; Lindsay Lohan; Sarah Jessica Parker; Will Ferrell; Kiefer Sutherland; the Nolan Brothers; Zac Efron; Matt Lucas; Rupert Goold; Jimmy McGovern; Russell T. Davies; David Tennant; Ian Rankin; Martin Amis; Seamus Heaney; John le Carré; Dave Eggers; Jacqueline Wilson; Michael Morpurgo; Darcey Bussell; Alexander McQueen; Stella McCartney; Miuccia Prada; Nick Knight; Johnnie Boden; Agyness Deyn; Jane Shepherdson; Christopher Bailey; David Hockney; Rankin; Sam Taylor-Wood; Louise Bourgeois; Richard Rogers; Santiago Calatrava; Yves Béhar; Bruce Mau; Rem Koolhaas; Frank Gehry; Perez Hilton; Alain Robert; Gerry, Kate and Madeleine McCann; Lonelygirl15; Gina Ford; Harry Redknapp; Wayne Rooney; Monica Ali; the people of Wootton Bassett.