Guy Carter looks a happy man – and no wonder, having just picked up the £7,500 Jeremy Mogford Prize for Food & Drink Writing, for the second consecutive year.

His repeated success astonished guests at the presentation party at Jeremy’s Quod Brasserie last Wednesday.

The 436 entries, from all over the world, had been judged anonymously.

Only when the process was completed, and Guy’s identity revealed, was it apparent that the Walthamstow-based caricaturist had triumphed again.

Jeremy said: “If I had gone to the bookies for odds on the same person winning the prize two years in a row these would have been at least 1,000 to one.”

But, pursuing the gambling analogy, he added that there could have been no question of withholding the prize.

“You can’t disqualify a Grand National winner just because he has won the race before.”

The outcome speaks volumes for the consistent approach of the judging panel, composed of the Mogford family, food writer Geraldene Holt and Donald Sloan, the head of the hospitality school at Oxford Brookes University.

“Guy will no doubt move on to fame and glory,” said Jeremy. “He is a very talented writer.”

A versatile one, too, to judge from the very different styles of his winning stories.

Last year’s was in macabre mood in the manner of Roald Dahl, as might be inferred from its title, Carnivores.

This year’s success, Bully Beef and Biscuits, harks back to the Second World War and two comestibles not beloved of the desert troops.

“Frightful stuff,” one of the characters says. “All we ever got to eat. Day after day. Tasted like damp cardboard. The biscuits weren’t any better either, just harder to chew.”

It must be presumed that Guy writes with the benefit of family knowledge. Bully Beef and Biscuits is dedicated to “my father who never touched them again after the Second World War”.