It does not seem likely that Barbara Windsor and Lynton Crosby would ever have expected to be members of the same club: the ultimate glamour-girl-turned-national-treasure and the dour-looking Australian political propagandist with a gift for translating a nation’s private prejudices into political pledges would, on the face of it, have little to say to one another over a drink. But they are now both appointed to the topmost rank of the Order of the British Empire, Ms Windsor as a dame commander, Mr Crosby as a knight. What a carry on.
The British honours system can only be understood as the living embodiment of the country’s creaky old constitution, an encrusted accumulation of tradition and convenience. There at the top is the small collection of awards that only the Queen can hand out; then come the knights and dames, dusty remnants of a feudal age, followed by carefully ranked honours awarded in the name of a defunct empire. From time to time this curious construct gets a gloss of modernisation, perhaps propelled by a scandal like David Lloyd George’s cash-for-honours, and so it survives for another generation, a hierarchical anachronism that is just not quite daft enough, nor used quite crassly enough, to galvanise a popular movement to overthrow it. The honouring of the Tory campaign boss Lynton Crosby, as a reward for his role in the election victory, may be one of the more egregious examples of the uses of patronage, yet it does not seem to be quite outrageous enough to provoke radical reform. More’s the pity.
Most countries have ways of honouring distinction (in Sweden, these include diligent reindeer husbandry), but trying to explain our particular honours system to anyone who did not grow up with it is on a par with introducing them to the rules of cricket. Like human remains exhumed intact from a peat bog, the British honours system is preserved by the environment in which it is embedded. It is based on a medieval king’s need to bind in the land-owning classes to royal service through the awarding of ranks as part-reward and part-encouragement. It has lasted because it was flexible; its first significant enhancement came when the rising power of democracy in the first world war and the needs of total mobilisation led to the creation of the Order of the British Empire, a way of recognising the efforts of ordinary people.
Another 50 years passed before, in the 1960s, Harold Wilson’s Labour government began a shift away from awards to those who had served the state towards those who made a contribution to the wider public good: this was the era that gave us MBEs for the Beatles. In the 1990s, John Major introduced public nominations; in the New Labour years, teachers, doctors and nurses – people in the public services – became the focus of attention. But at heart it is a system of patronage that the prime minister of the day can use as a kind of public affirmation of what matters to him or her: they can reward the eminently worthy – Dr Michael Jacobs, who was a leading participant in the campaign against Ebola, gets a knighthood, for example – and also the less obviously worthy (there’s another ladies’ underwear tycoon on the list) alike. And of course they can reward political loyalty and, by omission, punish the disloyal.
It is not chance that the system lingers on and shows no signs of expiring. However tottering a construction of myth and snobbery, its purpose has enduring appeal. There have been some eminent refuseniks – Stephen Hawking, for example, and Vanessa Redgrave, and from an earlier era JB Priestley and even William Gladstone – but only a handful each year reject an honour.
But this is not about individual social advancement, nor some financial reward. It is a way of establishing a kind of league table of national values. Like the conveyor belt in a sushi bar, a thousand names are slowly rolled out for popular judgment. Most are uncontentious. The idea of a British Empire Medal may carry a heavy load of outdated symbolism, but no one would question the virtue of the prime mover of the Stockport All Stars steel band, or the special needs support teacher in Stevenage, or the senior lunchtime supervisor at a primary school in Dewsbury. Many may deplore the power of political patronage and dismiss an honours system that fundamentally rests on hereditary monarchy. Yet a state needs some way of marking out citizens for their virtue. It should be a transparent and publicly legitimised process. But even this flawed system has its uses. It defines what we value, as well as what we don’t.
