Now, street sweepers and celebrities get these gongs, but the honours list has a colourful history
If the New Year honours list is dull and mostly decent again (it is), we only have ourselves to blame. In the good old days (or were they the bad ones?) the twice yearly dishing out of gongs with exotic, anachronistic names was colourful, class-ridden and decidedly rackety, like much else in post-imperial British public life.
There was something called the British Empire Medal which went to hospital porters and school cooks and has now been abolished. In more egalitarian times like ours, much-loved cooks and porters share the MBE with the golf prodigy Rory McIlroy. The winner of the US Open (at just 22) is one of 984 recipients of today's awards (587 MBEs), 70% of them for voluntary work and nominated by admiring fellow citizens. All are vetted by a series of high-minded Whitehall committees who are not even allowed to hand them out to each other quite so generously any more, though Jeremy Heywood, David Cameron's most senior official at No 10, has acquired a posh knighthood, a KCB, to go with his CB and his CVO.
Ten years ago, before Tony Blair was accused of trading honours for off-the-books party loans (an idea picked up from the Tories), the system still gave off a faint odour of disrepute and Buggin's Turn. Twenty years ago it was possible to give Jeffrey Archer his long-sought peerage (he had been noisily fundraising for Kurdish refugees) as a routine part of the honours system which gave out peerages and knighthoods to square MPs, donors and mates. A century ago there was an informal price list.
In 1976 Harold Wilson's resignation honours list, a more overtly political ritual, "astonished" the vetting committee but largely went ahead anyway. As with all such honours controversies which taint blameless cooks, distinguished scholars and artists, brilliant entrepreneurs and sports heroes, the 1976 "lavender list" row was grossly unfair to most recipients – those who didn't go to jail, take their own lives or were mere cronies.
It had to change. And growing public distaste hastened snail-like progress which still balks at making McIlroy's "E" stand for "Excellence" not "Empire." A committee of MPs proposed this modest reform in 2004, but not even Gordon Brown, uneasy with honours but keen on what he called "ordinary British heroes" (an OBH anyone?), could bring himself to sort out.
What happened instead was a series of disasters in which the end of public deference to the traditional great and good combined with growing media populism and transparency to expose fundraising sleaze in the 90s, not wholly checked by Labour's post-Ecclestone reforms. Companies became wary of donating to parties, rich individual donors found themselves being interviewed by the police and MPs who had come to regard honours as a perk good behaviour suddenly found the tap shut off. The expenses scandal clinched the message: no more perks.
So only two political knighthoods emerge today. Tory old sweat (and ex-Blue Peter producer) Roger Gale becomes Sir Rog ("for public and political services"), while Labour's Joan Ruddock (ex-CND and CAB) becomes an equivalent Dame. As with the humble MBEs and the grand Companions of Honour (just 65 of them), some recipients agonise ("a traitor to my class?" asked Radio 4's Jennie Murray), others love it. Harold Pinter took a CH as his due, Salman Rushdie took a K with his usual good grace.
It is all part of the new year ritual. Has Helena Bonham Carter (cousin Jane is a Lib Dem peer) been given today's CBE for being chummy with the Camerons, for playing the Queen Mum flatteringly in The King's Speech – or for not getting an Oscar? Why did IVF pioneer Robert Edwards wait more than 30 years to get a belated K? Was it because he and Patrick Steptoe (he died waiting) did their great work in Oldham?
To some it is all monstrous or embarrassing. But most human societies seem to need an honours system, including revolutionary Russia, America and France, where Napoleon, no less, dreamed up that discreet red lapel ribbon known as the Légion d'honneur. Very posh if you like the idea.