Honour bound

The inanity of minuting these conversations! The madness of putting on paper derogatory remarks about such very distinguished people! These were among the chief exclamations made at the Christmas party held by the Department of Constitutional Affairs, where much of the conversation concerned the leak of a paper in which the merits and demerits of 38 candidates for honours were ruled upon with extraordinary frankness by a committee of top civil servants, including the great Sir Hayden Phillips (profiled in this magazine on 16 August).

People’s reputations were assessed in this Cabinet Office paper, which was meant to remain secret for ever, in a wonderfully dismissive way, as if they were being considered for membership of an old and self-satisfied London club with a very long waiting list, which in a way they were. It was noted that John Taylor was ‘very promising when he moved from Hewlett-Packard, but that promise had not been altogether fulfilled’ in his role as director-general of UK research councils, while Christopher Allsopp, an economist who served on the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee, was ‘not thought to be a strong candidate’, for his work ‘was of questionable quality’.