David Attenborough is the most admired man in the country

David Attenborough is the most admired man in the UK, according to a poll of which public figures people look up to.

The broadcaster and naturalist’s position as the UK’s favourite comes as part of YouGov’s latest annual study of the world’s most admired people.

Bill Gates and Angelina Jolie topped the tables of the world’s most admired men and women, but when it came to the UK, the Blue Planet presenter took the title of most admired man, while Queen Elizabeth was our most popular woman.

Barack Obama was the second most admired man, followed by the late Stephen Hawking, Prince Harry and then Jeremy Corbyn, while Bill Gates came in sixth.

The Queen was followed by Michelle Obama, Dame Judie Dench, Harry Potter author JK Rowling and activist Malala Yousafzai.

To collect its data, YouGov gathered open-ended nominations from panellists across 35 countries in December, asking them: “Thinking about people alive in the world today, which [man or woman] do you most admire?”

The nominations were used to compile a list of the 20 men and 20 women who received the most nominations and were nominated in at least four countries. An extra 10 popular local figures were added to the lists for individual countries.

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YouGov then used the lists to poll each of the 35 countries asking two questions: “who do you truly admire?”, where respondents could make multiple selections, and “who do you MOST admire?”, where they could only pick one.

The two numbers were combined into a percentage share of admiration.

Tech pioneer and philanthropist Bill Gates has topped the list every time YouGov has conducted the survey, while Angelina Jolie has also come first in each of the three surveys since 2015 when separate male and female categories were introduced.

This year, the study expanded to cover the views of people in 35 countries – the most ever – and means that YouGov interviewed more than 37,000 people to compile the list.