Everyone knows that while Messrs Dale and Fawkes may have Britain's most popular blogs, they're certainly not the best ones out there. No, that accolade falls to a fearless iconoclast named Neil Clark, whose website last week finally gained some long-overdue recognition by being named the Best UK Blog in the prestigious 2007 Weblog Awards.

Neil has his critics - some say, for example, that his pro-Milosevic fetish ("a man whose worst crime was to carry on being socialist") is pathetic at best and sinister at worst. Others contend that he is a genocide denier who believes that the Srebenica massacre was basically a Western fabrication (an accusation memorably rebutted by Mr Clark with the phrase "I am not 'an apologist for genocide'- no genocide occurred". Still others suggest that his recent piece on Comment is Free calling for Iraqi 'collaborators' and 'quislings' to be barred from this country, and openly sniggering at the prospect of their being executed by militia, marked a low point for that already discredited site.

Neil is a man of many parts - not only a journalist but also a candidate in leafy Wantage for the British People's Alliance, whose manifesto includes, inter alia, the following:

The British People’s Alliance is also determined to expose, to halt, and to reverse the deliberate importation of a new working class whose members understand no English except commands, know nothing about workers' rights in this country, can be deported if they step out of line, and (since they have no affinity with any particular part of this country) can be moved around at will, so that the old working class can be told to go hang, taking with it its unions, its minimum wage, its health and safety regulations, and so forth.

The British People’s Alliance is determined to expose, to halt, and to reverse the enforced bilingualism or multilingualism that transfers economic, social, cultural and political power to a bilingual or multilingual elite, so that those who are or will be excluded are or will be the English-speaking working class, black and white.

... which would not, in my view, be out of place in the manifesto of the BNP - what does "to expose, to halt, and to reverse" signify, after all, if not a policy of forced repatriation? Still, each to their own.

Clark was also the protagonist in a pointless legal spat with Oliver Kamm, the details of which you can wade through here should you be so minded. Finally, and most deliciously of all, his now-famous conversation with a spambot in the comments under one of his posts still raises a smile.

Some have suggested that these various factors indicate Mr Clark to be a figure of fun, not a commentator whose views are worthy of serious discussion and debate. This award explodes that myth, and exposes such criticisms as little more than the jealous scribblings of lesser, if more popular, bloggers.

In case you're one of the naysayers who is wondering how the hell Neil Clark won a poll to find the best UK Blog when he seems to get significantly fewer visitors than even me, this hilarious post by Matt Wardman counts the number of times Clark plugged the awards on his blog - nineteen times in five days, which is surely some sort of record - and the Herculean efforts he put in to making sure that all his mates manned their computers 24/7; as the poll allowed for people to vote more than once, it quickly degenerated into a pissing contest, and Neil was getting through a lot of coffee. Having romped home by a country mile, Neil then launched into several days of self-congratulation, which prompted this immortal response from commenter Danijela:

Danijela said..

Congratulations! I have visited this blog for the first time having seen news of your victory!

Mostly, your blog seems to be about how readers can vote in the 2007 Weblog Awards. Do you do other stuff too?

I must now confess that I too am one of these puffed-up neocon critics of Mr Clark's. The Guardian moderators saw fit to edit, to the point of emasculation, my comment on his self-congratulatory article last Friday. While I am grateful to Oliver Kamm for setting me straight on the suggestion I made that Clark was paid by the Guardian for his article, the last paragraph of my original comment will otherwise serve as a fair summary of my view:

Neil Clark is, in my opinion, little better than a fascist in the precise sense of that word, and for CiF to be giving him house room - far less paying him for his musings - is disgusting.