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.