Yes, it’s that day of the year when we all sit around the kitchen table and say, “How the hell did he get an honour for that?” Simon Hughes is knighted for losing his seat in the last election, Simon Burns MP gets his for calling Speaker John Bercow “A stupid, sanctimonious dwarf” and our dear old Queen chucks gongs at four multimillionaires who just happen to be major donors to the Conservative Party! Oh, and Katie Cutler who raised £300,000 for pensioner Alan Barnes after he was mugged gets a BEM, which in terms of the honours system is a mid range Blue Peter badge.
To be fair, and it’s hard to be that fair given the list of lickspittles who have been handed awards for simply doing their jobs (one guy at the MOD gets a gong for “services to defence acquisition” for god’s sake) and for supporting the right, or normally wrong, political party.
As ever, the big awards are reserved for men with five times as many men being knighted as women being damed (I am not sure if that’s what you call it) but that’s probably because the committees comprise of mainly men.
Now I like Sir Lenny Henry as we now must refer to him. He’s a decent enough comedian who has come a long way since he was a contestant on New Faces. He’s become an actor too and has used his fame to help propel Comic Relief to its status as one of the most loved charities in the land. Good on him and I am certainly not going to begrudge him his new title. That he is black is important too because for too long the awards system has been dominated by white men. I am not quite sure how his award will greatly change the lot of those of BAME because it is an honour which happened today but one which will disappear into the ether as time goes by.
Quite why former Tory Party Treasurer Henry Angest has been knighted is another matter altogether. An ex banker, he has given the Tory Party almost £2 million and provided the party with a £5 million overdraft facility through a private bank in which he is the majority stakeholder. And the reason for his award? “Political service”. Yeah, right. Let’s be crystal clear about this: the Tories are rewarding their donors with gongs. And in terms of the public good, is Angest’s generosity to the Conservative Party deserving of a far more important award than Katie Cutler?
And don’t start me on Jeremy Isaacs, who was CEO of Lehman Brothers Europe and has gifted David Cameron some £416,000. He gets an “honorary knighthood”. In case you were wondering, this is the same Lehman Brothers whose bankruptcy in 2008 started the worldwide financial crash for which the rest of us have been paying a heavy price ever since. As I understand it, the award is supposedly for something else he has done, but come on: we’re not totally stupid. This is David Cameron’s way of saying thanks.
Do we need an honours system? I don’t think there is a simple yes or no to this question. Should we reward those who go above and beyond for the public good? Yes, but all of them? I know people who have received awards and they have thoroughly deserved them, but there are a lot of people who seem to get awards for turning up for work. And that includes actors, sportsmen, musicians – the whole works. But when the system rewards cronies and party apparatchiks, it becomes utterly discredited.
There are probably 10 deserved awards for every dubious one, but it’s the dubious ones that really annoy me. We still live in a society where class matters and money buys influence and the awards system as it currently is merely accentuates the negative and keeps the riff raff in their place.
Still, well done to Sir Van Morrison, even though his finest work, Astral Weeks, was released in 1968. He’ll be laughing and joking about it today just as I’m not.
