Lynn Faulds Wood, former presenter of BBC’s Watchdog, says she turned down an MBE because she ‘just wouldn’t accept it while we still have party donors donating huge amounts of money and getting an honour’. Any self-respecting political donor will equally have rejected an honour on the grounds that it demeans the system to have them handed out to every Tom, Dick and Harry who appears on radio and television.
Honours have become a debased currency. This time around, 1197 of them have been handed out. There will be another pile in the summer with the Queen’s birthday honours. Carry on like this and there won’t be anyone on the outside of prison who doesn’t have an honour. In fact, we might as well turn the whole thing on its head and make it a dishonours system – hand everyone an MBE at birth but then take it away if they are naughty.
No-one demonstrates the inflation in honours better than Sir Roger Bannister. Now, if you win any sort of medal at the Olympics you have a good chance of winning an MBE. Win more than one gold and you are on the fast-track to a knighthood. Bannister, by contrast, had to wait until 1975 – 21 years after his record-breaking sub-four minute mile – to receive his knighthood. And even then it was awarded for his service as Chairman of the Sports Council, not as a delayed recognition of his athletic achievement.
Today, Sir Roger has been made a Companion of Honour – a recognition, perhaps, of honours inflation. He has been booted even further upstairs in order to distinguish him from the growing crowd of honoured sports people.
An Olympic gold medal, surely, is a very public recognition of achievement in itself. It doesn’t need to be followed up almost automatically with an honour from the Queen. If the honours system serves any purpose at all it is surely to reward achievements which otherwise would go unnoticed by the public. Sir Roger – who is a distinguished neurologist – has often said that he is prouder of his achievements in the medical field than he is of running the first sub four minute mile. After all, he did spend considerably longer working as a doctor than he did as an athlete.
It would be good if we had woken up this morning to learn the names of people who similarly have been beavering away for a lifetime, making great breakthroughs in their fields, but whose achievements have never been picked upon outside academic journals and the like. Maybe there are some of these people on the list. But as ever, they are lost in the reams of newly-honoured comedians, sitcom stars and lollipop ladies who take the headlines.
Comments