It’s fitting, I suppose, that Britain’s vote to leave the EU should precipitate a row of irreducibly British character. In a moment of wide-reaching political crisis, David Cameron’s decision to hand out baubles to his favourite remainers is a superbly trivial, prim, class-polluted point of fulmination. Half a century or so from now, when the whole country is underwater and the survivors are up to their ankles at the top of Ben Nevis, we will almost certainly be muttering about whether it’s appropriate for the new prime minister to have taken his tie off.
That’s not to say the whole thing isn’t utterly tawdry. Some bosses on their way out put some money behind the bar; this one puts some letters behind your name. Cameron won his reprieve from the recrimination that you might expect to pursue the man who took us out of Europe by keeping his head down and appealing to a sense that he’s probably feeling horrible enough about it already. At least he’s undermined that amnesty in a bipartisan way.
It’s hard to say who will feel more aggrieved: leavers who quite reasonably see it as a defiant parting V-sign from the old establishment, a Liam Byrne moment for our times; or remainers who will scratch their heads and wonder how we lost, if everyone in charge was so brilliant as to deserve an honour. How many dukedoms would he have had to distribute if they’d actually done their jobs well enough to win?
The honours system is rather like the royal family: fine until it starts reverting to type. Its deployment as a means of venerating your allies in the last knockings of your power is a senseless way of doing exactly that. Is Cameron blind to how this looks, or does he simply not care? My hunch is the latter – that it feels, from the inside, like a nobly defiant gesture of his loyalty to a group of people he loves. And Will Straw. From anywhere else, it looks like the perfect valedictory emblem for a premiership that was often defined by a sense that a bunch of mates had taken over the country and didn’t much care what anyone else thought.
Cameron is not the first resigning prime minister to get himself into this sort of hot water, but he ought to be the last. Resignation honours, handed out by leaders who no longer have to worry what anyone thinks about them, are accountability free, a feudal-feeling anachronism that will only ever stir up trouble. And honours ought to be for people doing something truly exceptional, not their jobs – even if their jobs are in government.
In future, resignation honours ought to be reconstituted as a gift not of the old prime minister, but of the new one acting on his or her advice. And civil servants and ministers should be subjected to a five-year cooling off period before they get their titles. At minimum, I presume that the merit of this suggestion makes me eligible for a CBE.
