It looks like yet another year is about to pass without me gaining the gong I so richly deserve. Nearly 40 years of public service, two charity jobs and now two years as a foodbank volunteer. Add to that, numerous charity donations, years as a trade union representative, secretary to a football club – I mean, what else could I have done in life in order to get that knighthood? Or … about 45 years in paid work and choosing to do other stuff that I wanted to do. Hmm, put it that way and perhaps I don’t deserve national recognition after all. In that case, how come Thérèse Coffey has been awarded a Damehood?
I’ll be honest with you, dear reader, and cheerfully admit that I don’t want and certainly don’t deserve a gong. I think that by and large, though not always, I have been a good person. I have done bad things, made misjudgements and I am the first to admit that my civil service career was an outstanding example of mediocrity. As Seasick Steve once said, I started out with nothin’ and I still got most of it left. Yet the same rules don’t apply to everyone. Let’s look at the evidence.
In the last government, ministers were routinely awarded honours, merely for doing their jobs, badly in the case of the likes of ‘Sir’ Jacob Rees-Mogg and ‘Dame’ Priti Patel. Trust me, there are many, many more people who got gongs under the Tories, not least the likes of Charlotte Owen, an advisor to Boris Johnson, who was given a life peerage at the age of 30, for? Ian Botham got a knighthood for playing cricket and a peerage for supporting Brexit (and admittedly a few high profile charity walks) but trust me I know many people who have done far more than ‘Beefy’ in our country for zero reward. It’s a joke. And now, the bang average, at best, Ms Coffey gets a damehood for what? Public service, that being nine years as a backbench MP and five as a completely useless minister – ask anyone at the DWP just how shit she was – and that is enough. By that token, I reckon any time-serving public servant should get at least a peerage, shouldn’t I? I’m not bitter, though. Honest.
I know that Coffey is fond of karaoke, as we can see here, but I am not sure this should have been enough to convince the short-trousered loser Rishi Sunak that she should be given such a prestigious honour. Mind you, I once sang It’s Not Unusual at the Luckwell Club in Bristol to an excited karaoke audience, one of whose members through a pair of her knickers at me. Sadly, I never got to discover her identity, but that’s another story. Surely it’s worth at least an MBE?
We will go through more of the honours nonsense again in December when the New Year’s Honours List is announced, as people who deserve honours either get nothing or maybe a BEM or, if they are really lucky an MBE, but we all know the big stuff will be reserved for figures of the establishment and nonentities who get ‘rewarded’ for doing their jobs, often very badly.
Sadly, I’ll have to live with the rejection as I set out to feed the world because I don’t expect to be rewarded for having done my job or for doing what I wanted to do.
Save the real honours for people who really deserve them. Especially those who go beyond the norm, who do good things not to be rewarded, but because they want to make the world a better place. Sadly, in Britain, we are happy with a broken system that rewards and indeed encourages mediocrity, like Thérèse Coffey.
