Diary – 3 January 2004

The recent story in the Sunday Times about the hundreds of people who have declined honours in the past 50 or 60 years was fascinating. Contrary to the usual interpretation, it showed that the system is actually fairer than I thought. The list was dominated by people of immense worth whose apparent neglect by the establishment had seemed inexplicable. The other day the self-advertising poet and retired burglar Benjamin Zephaniah rejected an honour as a protest against colonial oppression (yawn). How much better to have the inward satisfaction, and the good manners, to refuse privately. Only one refusenik was well known to me, and that was the composer George Lloyd. He declined a CBE in 1996, two years before his death. I would like to think that, like Evelyn Waugh, George refused because he was holding out for the knighthood he richly merited, but he was the least self-regarding person you could ever wish to meet. I suspect the real reason was that George, a devoted Thatcherite, detested too much the man who made him the offer, John Major, for squandering his heroine’s legacy.

Anyway, many will not have refused a bauble in the New Year Honours, and therefore will now be that little bit (or a lot) happier. The process is now pretty disgusting, with utterly meretricious people being given gongs so that Labour can suck up to large constituencies, such as to those who follow soccer or buy pop records. The honours system is now divorced from its original purpose, which was to reward leadership, merit, service and a contribution to our country. The lack of imagination in the process also leads to many who are recognised being honoured inadequately. One such is George Lloyd’s heroine. Lady Thatcher reputedly declined an earldom because she feared that her son’s inheriting it would be controversial.