Obviously, when you look at Prince Philip you think to yourself, what that man needs is another title. Duke isn’t really good enough. Or Order of the Garter or Commander in Chief of the British Army Cadet Force or Lord High Admiral of the Royal Navy – these are just a few of zillions of course. But on Australia Day this year Tony Abbott, as part of his “captain’s pick”, gave Prince Philip the nation’s highest honour and made him a knight.
This was controversial at the time, as he is mostly known in Australia for asking an indigenous Australian on his 2002 visit: “Do you still throw spears at each other?”
Sensibly, the new prime minister of Australia, Malcolm Turnbull, has declared knights and dames are “not appropriate” in a modern honours system and is scrapping them from the Order of Australia. Knights and dames are anachronistic in 2015, he believes. Well, of course they are. The whole honours system is, as it connects to bequeathed rank.
The consequences of ermined bowing and scraping were seen last week as mega-rich Lords jetted in to vote on tax credits. A few people noticed that we don’t live in a democracy at all but that our feudal overlords are now bra saleswomen, a writer of musicals and the sons of someone already titled.
The honours system, hereditary peerage or political cronyism is the outreach part of the monarchy and the establishment. It rewards mainly itself, with the odd gong going to a subject that does good work. It is tacky beyond belief. Who wants an order of the “British Empire” . Yet all these rebels who don’t buy into it still get down on one knee. Sir David Hare? To me anyone who accepts an honour may as well just get a badge saying, “I’m naff”. As for the ones who put it on their Twitter bios or headed notepaper, they are lost, aren’t they?
There are two types of people: those with enough integrity to refuse the flummery of this nonsense and those that don’t. The refuseniks are more honourable and inarguably cooler. David Hockney, Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, LS Lowry and George Melly, among others.
When David Bowie was offered a knighthood in 2003 he said: “I would never have any intention of accepting anything like that. I seriously don’t know what it is for. It’s not what I spent my life working for.” Nigella Lawson, daughter of a life peer, said succinctly when declining an OBE: “I’m not saving lives.” Exactly! Why further decorate the already decorated when there are so many people who go unrecognised? And why do we have to be recognised by this rusty system anyway? As another refusenik, the great JG Ballard said, all this is about reinforcing privilege and rank and snobbery in a class- divided society. Loyalty, he said, should be felt to fellow citizens and the country as a whole.
Why do we have to kneel before the Queen? It’s a farce. And isn’t it hilarious that there is a cargo cult in Vanuatu where pictures of Prince Philip are worshipped as a divine being? Well, it would be if we weren’t much better than an institutionalised cargo cult ourselves.
• This article was amended on 3 November 2015. An earlier version said Turnbull was scrapping the Order of Australia. Knights and dames are to be scrapped from the Order of Australia, but other levels of awards remain.
