I’ve long loathed the idea of the ‘National Treasure’. Even typing the words made my eyes briefly cross with extreme crossness. You know the type, they are wheeled out every Christmas as we huddle around the television. Though they can be anything from actors to zoologists, they will have one loathsome character trait in common; they were all massively ambitious when young, but they like to pretend that their success was somehow organic and that only other – shallow, grasping – people are driven by attention-seeking and greedy for money.
Anneliese Dodds, the former Labour Minister for Women who was unable to explain what a woman was, has been made a Dame, which seems a bit binary
And what is a National Treasure’s ultimate goal? A New Year Honour: a lovely shiny gong, stuck on you by the head honcho himself, to show hoi polloi how special you are. Of course, this isn’t true of all those who get a gong. My immensely brave first father-in-law, Victor Parsons, went to Buckingham Palace, aged just 20, to be awarded the Distinguished Service Medal by King George VI. This military medal for bravery was the exact opposite of a New Year Honour bauble. To quote his son, the writer Tony Parsons, here’s what happened:
‘You’ve done very well, Parsons,’ King George VI told my father just before he presented his DSM.
My old man indicated the rows of medals on the King’s chest.
‘You haven’t done so bad yourself,’ said my dad, and the pair of them had a laugh about that.’
One wonders if the present monarch would take a similar bit of good-humoured joshing regarding his lack of military action, while being festooned with medals. Queen Victoria certainly wouldn’t have been amused. She started the New Year Honours awards in 1890; she had become Empress of India in 1876, making her the ruler of more than 250 million people, despite never once visiting the place. You don’t have to be Owen Jones to find this a bit of a cheek, which makes it all the more mystifying that people who quite rightly abhor the idea of one country being ruled by another clamour to get their paws on awards which all have the dreaded E-word in the title; Knight Grand Cross or Dame Grand Cross of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (GBE); Knight Commander or Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (KBE or DBE); Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE); Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE); and Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE).
There are 1,157 recipients in this year’s list; many of them are people who have built careers in everything from academia to the military. Some have worked selflessly for charity – these are the cohort which no one disapproves of, naturally. But it’s invariably the showbiz and sports personalities who draw the eye, an invisible velvet rope around them, and cause us to feel somewhat surprised and sometimes shocked.
Torvill and Dean: why now? Ellie Goulding: for making music that sounds like snatches of soundtracks for sanitary protection television commercials? No, for ‘services to biodiversity and the climate’. Cynthia Erivo, who became notorious this year for her flagrantly unhinged public gropes with Ariana Grande? Idris Elba – someone’s trying to be cool! Anneliese Dodds, the former Labour Minister for Women who was unable to explain what a woman was, has been made a Dame, which seems a bit binary. Can a Dame have a penis? Or is there nothing like a Dame? These are questions I’d be keen to ask her. And mystifyingly, a plastic surgeon named Simon Eccles become a Lieutenant of the Royal Victorian Order (LVO) for his ‘service to the monarch’. What’s that about?
But there’s nothing here as entertaining as the ongoing spectacle of Lenny Henry – sorry, Sir Lenworth Henry, Commander of the British Empire since the New Year Honours of 1999 – tying himself in knots trying to be elitist and radical at the same time. This alleged comedian (I’ve never seen it, but anyone who marries Dawn French must have a sense of humour) started his TV career in the Black And White Minstrel Show in 1975, later claiming that this sent him into a ‘wormhole of depression’ and that his family should have stopped him. This seems a bit of a blame-throw on an underprivileged immigrant family who must have been delighted that one of their seven children was finding a way out.
Henry did great. He became the face of Premier Inn, but I bet he doesn’t stay in them because he’s exceedingly rich; he was also becoming more left-wing, as entertainers do to detract from their unfair level of wealth, compared to what, say, nurses get paid. He got into a bit of trouble with the British Stammering Association for a skit of The King’s Speech film he performed for Comic Relief, being accused of ‘a gross and disgusting gleefulness at pointing out someone else’s misfortune’. But it was in 2025 that he totally be-clowned himself by writing in a book called The Big Payback in support of the idea that UK government should give £18 trillion in compensatory payments to black Britons as reparations for slavery. I hope he doesn’t think he deserves any, with that Premier Inn gig keeping the coffers overflowing. And I hope he’s going to hand back his NYH, which actually has the word Empire in it.
Far better to be in the cool club of those celebrities who have turn down New Years Honours, like David Bowie
If you spend a good deal of time slagging off the system, you’re going to look pretty stupid being honoured by it, as if you’re basically selling out your beliefs for something shiny. Conversely, this is why the honouring of the Lionesses with CBEs and MBEs – and an honorary dame-hood for the Dutch manager Sarina Wiegman – seems entirely appropriate. From Chloe Kelly’s gleeful cry ‘I’m so proud to be English!’ after winning the Euros last year to Wiegman’s beautifully gracious statement ‘I would like to express my sincere gratitude for this honour. When I first arrived in England, I could never have imagined the respect and warmth I’ve experienced from the English people. I deeply thank the fans for their support’, this is the kind of reaction which saves the honours from being a total sham.
Sometimes there are elements of tragedy involved which sit strangely alongside second-rate pop stars getting medals, and which make them feel so chaotic and discombobulated. The attempts by the state to make up for the horrific Post Office scandal look suspiciously like too little, too late; Betty Brown, who at 92 is the oldest surviving victim of the debacle, told BBC Breakfast that she accepted her OBE on behalf of all those whose lives were damaged and sometimes destroyed: ‘Every one of them should have an OBE. Every one of them for what they’ve [Post Office] put us through and what we have stood solid and faithful for. I did it for justice.’ Then there’s the 101-year-old Jewish D-Day veteran Mervyn Kersh, a soldier at 19, awarded a British Empire Medal, who says ‘What’s disappointing is the anti-Semitism that I see everywhere.’ What must he make of the OBE given to Charlotte Moore, former chief content officer at the BBC, for ‘services to public broadcasting’? Moore, of course, quit following February’s BBC documentary about Gaza narrated by the son of a Hamas official. That programme surely added another brick in the wall of the poisonous anti-Semitism now sweeping this country.
So on the whole, in the manner of not wanting to join any club that would have me, I wouldn’t want an honour that the likes of Moore was given. Far better to be in the cool club of those celebrities who have turn down New Years Honours, like David Bowie (‘I would never have any intention of accepting anything like that. I seriously don’t know what it’s for. It’s not what I spent my life working for’) Jennifer Saunders (‘It didn’t seem right somehow. We didn’t deserve a pat on the back. It felt a bit fake to stand alongside people who devoted their lives to truly worthy causes’) and Nigella Lawson (‘I’m not saving lives and I’m not doing anything other than something I absolutely love’).
Even people not to my taste such as Ken Loach, who turned down an OBE, expressed it well; ‘It’s all the things I think are despicable: patronage, deferring to the monarchy, and the name of the British Empire, which is a monument of exploitation and conquest…it’s not a club you want to join when you look at the villains who’ve got it.’ Jim Broadbent simply said ‘I don’t think the British Empire is something that I particularly want to celebrate.’ Something for that be-knighted National Treasure Sir Lenworth to consider next time he demands £18 trillion for the crimes of Empire, perhaps.
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