Gyles Brandreth is a writer, broadcaster, former MP and Government Whip - and one of Britain's most sought-after award ceremony hosts and after-dinner speakers.

A reporter on The One Show on BBC1 and a regular on Radio 4's Just a Minute, Gyles is the author of the acclaimed Victorian detective stories The Oscar Wilde Murder Mysteries, published in seventeen countries around the world and adapted for TV.

Gyles won his first prize as a public speaker as a schoolboy of fifteen. At Oxford, aged twenty, he was elected President of the Oxford Union. At 22, he turned professional and since then he has spoken all over the world, in venues as varied as the Helmsley Palace, New York and Buckingham Palace, London. His audiences have ranged from the executives of Coca-Cola to a silent order of nuns, from a thousand bankers in Frankfurt to ten thousand members of the WI at Wembley Arena. He has featured in the Guinness Book of Records for making the world's longest-ever after-dinner speech. To raise funds for the National Playing Fields Association, he spoke non-stop for twelve and a half hours.