If someone ever asks what you think about the honours system, they may have a hidden motive.
That’s what happened to me two years or so ago. A friend asked with deceptive casualness what I thought about honours.
Perhaps I glimpsed what lay behind his question, as my reply was bubble-wrapped in waffle. Later my friend told me he’d just been offered an MBE and was wondering whether to accept.
He did and now carries those letters after his name. A deserved honour for a good man and you’ll get no argument from me about that.
But honours still stink sometimes. And we’ll get to that bad smell in a paragraph or two.
As it happens, my view then as now is that the system offers proper recognition for those who deserve the honour – and shabby elevation for those who don’t.
According to a report in the Daily Mirror a couple of days ago, between 1951 and 1999, 277 people declined an honour, as confirmed by the Cabinet Office in 2012.
Early refuseniks included film director Alfred Hitchcock and children’s author Roald Dahl. More recent decliners include French and Saunders, David Bowie, Paul Weller, Danny Boyle, Ken Loach, Alan Bennett, Jon Snow and Benjamin Zephaniah.
The TV cook Nigella Lawson also turned down an OBE, reportedly saying: “I’m not saying lives and I’m not doing anything other than something I absolutely love.”
A rejection as finely sieved as her flour.
Most of this year’s honours went to ordinary people for the contributions they have made to society – people such as my friend.
That seems perfectly fine.
The problem comes when the recipients are already famous, such as the singer Sir Elton John or the cricketer Ben Stokes, both honoured the other day. No doubting their respective greatness in field or on piano stool, but they don’t really need an honour, do they?
Honours to sports stars such as Stokes are often made in a burst of over-excitement about some victory or other. Fair enough, but to use the Nigella Formula, they’re not saving lives, just doing what they love.
Sometimes your view may depend on how you regard the person being honoured. Favourable in my case for the cookery writer Nigel Slater OBE, a long-time kitchen friend; horribly unfavourable in the case of the Tory MP Iain Duncan Smith, proud Brexiter, benefits slasher and all too public picker of his nose (anyone could be guilty of one of those, but not all three).
Granting a knighthood to the architect of universal credit is just outrageous. Only last April the Institute for Fiscal Studies said that universal credit disproportionately reduced incomes among poorer adults. A cruel system introduced by a man of casual cruelty (oh go on then, slap an ‘allegedly’ in there if you must).
That is the main reason Duncan Smith should never have been given this honour. Other disqualifications should have included his charmless interventions in public life, his rank air of superiority, his preening uselessness, that wanky sports car – and all those times he makes me swear at the radio.
I will hand over to the financial broadcaster Paul Lewis, who tweeted:
“Iain Duncan Smith gets a knighthood as long as he applies online at a public library, declares his and his wife’s income and capital, gives up two of his four children, and then waits six weeks for it. If he fails to meet targets his award is downgraded to a CBE for 12 months.”
Ruder observations were made on Twitter, but I like that one. Duncan Smith is a man without honour who didn’t deserve one.
A good improvement to the honours system would be for all serving politicians to be denied honours. The partisan backslapping involved in political honours really does this country no favours.