Séamas O'Reilly: Britain's honours system - and the stench of mould

Founder and chairman of JD Wetherspoon, Tim Martin, who has been made a Knight Bachelor in the New Year Honours list, for services to hospitality and to culture.

I used to live in a flat with black mould. It was fairly contained on a wall near one hall, behind some coats and old rucksacks. 

My wife and I weren’t delighted about it. We complained about it frequently. It was ugly and embarrassing, and when visitors came we’d make a point of lamenting its presence loudly. “Oh, that?” we’d say, “God, it’s awful, we hate it”.

When they said we should get it removed, we agreed and said we really should tell our landlord.

Inevitably, however, by the time they’d left, we’d tell ourselves that there wasn’t really much we could do about it. 

We lived in a rented house and our landlord would likely have to make root and branch structural changes, that would have been disruptive if they even happened — which was unlikely.

Past experience had taught us that petitioning him to change things, while taking up plenty of effort and energy on our part, hadn’t ever really yielded any results. 

Besides, the mould was hidden away in its own small patch of the flat — making it so easy to ignore, that weeks or months would go by without us thinking about it at all.

I was reminded of it this week while talking to English friends about Britain’s honour system. If you’re not aware, at the turning of each year a flurry of gongs are issued to over 1,000 Brits.

There are the rankings you may be more familiar with: Knights, Dames, OBEs and CBEs, etc. 

But there are also military honours and a full suite of additional titles — the Order of Bath, the Royal Victorian Order, The Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George — which are less well known, but number into the hundreds by themselves.

All of these are separate from the crown’s Birthday Honours, which are released in June, and which — taken with the January ones — total about 2,000 laurels passed from crown to subject each calendar year.

On its face, there’s — arguably — something quite nice about the idea in principle. 

Thousands of people — a fair few of whom appear to be everyday citizens who’ve committed their lives to public service or charity work — get official recognition from the state for their actions, along with a little medal and perhaps a trip to the palace for a swish little do.

Even if one might quibble with the imperial trappings of an award stylised as being from the British Empire herself, or the broader blasphemy that such hard-working and useful members of society are bestowed this honour by hereditary monarchs — whose singular lifetime achievement will always be the fact that they were born — many of those awarded very much deserve recognition for their work, and their pride and delight at receiving such accolades should not be discounted.

Usually — however — the big-ticket announcements are for celebrities, politicians, high-ranking executives, and other public figures. 

This week saw Dame Jilly Cooper and Sir Michael Eavis ennobled, while Wetherspoons boss and diehard Brexit advocate Tim Martin proved one of the most divisive knights this year.

More controversial by far, however, were Liz Truss’ resignation honours — a separate grouping again, I’m sorry — which were pushed out at the same time, and served to stretch the limits of anyone’s goodwill. 

The former prime minister served just 49 days in the job, before resigning in disgrace for crashing the economy with unfunded tax cuts, and spent the last three weeks of her premiership in a race to the death with a supermarket lettuce — which she lost.

Despite this, she retained the right to hand peerages to donors and allies, including former “Vote Leave” chairman John Moynihan — who has donated nearly £600,000 (€695,000) to the Conservative Party and £53k (€61,400) to Truss’ office alone last year.

He joined his former chief executive of “Vote Leave” — and Ms Truss’ deputy chief of staff — Ruth Porter, who can now all sit in the House of Lords together and pass legislation that affects ordinary Brits for the rest of their lives.

This is — sadly — par for the course, as June’s release of Boris Johnson’s own honours included peerages for the 31-year-old Conservative party political director Ross Kempell and 30-year-old parliamentary assistant Charlotte Owen, whose service in government was described by one Downing St insider as “extraordinarily junior”.

Baroness Owen’s example is instructive, since it speaks to where the frontiers of Britain’s tolerance might lie — with one government source calling it “impossible to defend, even as somebody who broadly thinks the current peerage system is right”.

And therein lies the rub. Every time such egregious acts of cronyism are committed, there is a mild uproar. But nothing is done, changed, or amended out of some sense that the system currently in place is there for good or ill. That it’s here and going nowhere. 

That an entire catalogue of lifelong honours can —and should — be handed to cronies and bag men, according to the whims of those in power who’ve profited from their association. 

That a system of direct material reward for services rendered to those already in power must be not only accepted, but sustained and codified in the legislative branch of a world power. 

That ordinary, working people will receive baubles of ribboned tin for lives dedicated to public service, while those who worked to make their lives harder every day will be given seats in the House of Lords.

Of course, when I say all of this, my English friends agree, more or less. They think it’s terrible too. But what is there to do? 

The kind of root and branch structural changes it would take don’t bear thinking about. And it will, of course, be quickly forgotten. Over a lifetime, you get used to the stench of mould.