Great Britons poll is 'bonkers and rigged'

The BBC's Great Britons poll was branded a "cheap publicity stunt" and "bonkers" last night as Winston Churchill headed for the winning post with a 15,000 vote lead, amid claims of ballot-rigging.

After weeks of campaigning by celebrities ranging from Jeremy Clarkson to Mo Mowlam, the wartime leader looked set to outstrip his rival, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, as "the greatest Briton ever".

But as the final votes were being cast in the run-up to tonight's climactic BBC2 debate, the nationwide poll was in danger of degenerating into farce.

For the second time in a week, Ladbrokes suspended betting after a suspiciously "big gamble" in the vicinity of Brunel University whose engineering students have been accused of using all manner of tactics – including "hijacking" lecturers' computers – to ensure the 19th-century engineer's victory in the poll. Ladbrokes, together with William Hill, which closed its books far earlier, faces a six-figure pay-out if Brunel wins.

Meanwhile, Churchill's elevation to a narrow 15,000-vote lead over Brunel was not without controversy. His last-minute surge was put down to a concerted mass voting operation organised by members of the International Churchill Society.

As the total number of votes cast for the three-month long poll topped one million, leading writers and broadcasters emerged to criticise the exercise from the sidelines. Philip Pullman, the Whitbread Prize-winning children's author, dismissed it as a "pointless pub-licity stunt" with no educational value whatsoever.

"If you asked all 60 million of us individually who we thought the greatest Briton was you might get a better idea, but so what? It would still be totally pointless."

Even Andrew Marr, the BBC's political editor who enthusiastically championed Charles Darwin in one of the most praised programmes in the Great Britons series, now has his reservations.

Mr Marr, who entered into a "friendly bet" with Mr Clarkson over whose candidate would come highest in the final vote, said of Brunel's continuing high position: "It's completely bonkers."

Unlike the BBC, which maintains its voting system is as secure as it can be, Mr Marr has no illusions about why Brunel has fared so well. "I'm highly suspicious," he said. "If you look at the pattern of voting there is a very interesting trend. After programmes that have nothing at all to do with Brunel there is always a huge surge of votes in his favour."

Conspiracy theorists at Brunel University say that academics have logged on to their computers to register votes, only to find that someone else has already done so.

The BBC puts this down to a technical glitch linked to the system put in place to discourage multiple voting. Individual computers can only be used once to vote after each programme, meaning that terminals linked up to larger networks will only be able to register a single vote. However, this has left open a loophole enabling canny voters to use the same email address to register any number of votes from different computers.

Mr Clarkson laughed off accusations that the push for Brunel was the result of vote-rigging on a mass scale. He plans to use tonight's edition of Top Gear, screened before the Great Britons final, to urge viewers to back his man.

Commenting on his sparring with Mr Marr, he said: "I've never been that confident that Brunel would actually win – just that he would beat Darwin. Thankfully, the bearded plagiarist Darwin is now well and truly off the radar."