Journalists should scrutinise politicians – not accept honours from them

Our House of Lords is so fat it’s the butt of ridicule. More than eight times as many members ‘sit’ in our second chamber as in the Senate of the United States. True, some Lords in former lives did great or good deeds. Not all in our upper house are mere political paymasters or hoary ex-vote-winners. But we have too many of every sort in there: far too many. 

One whole incestuous layer could be dug straight out of the UK honours system: out from the Lords, and out also from below it. Nobody from our media should carry a title. And none needs, either, to wear a gong. Not broadcasters, not journos, not editors, not their managers — and certainly not their owners.  

Take the Daily Express, perhaps Fleet Street’s most uncritical cheerleader for Margaret Thatcher’s final government. The paper’s editor Nick Lloyd (a fine tabloid veteran) was rewarded by a knight bachelorhood of the realm in Mrs Thatcher’s resignation honours. The chairman of that same newspaper group — Baron Stevens of Ludgate — got his life-peerage earlier still, in the very year of Mrs Thatcher’s third general election victory. Some years later a formidable conservative and controversialist, the owner of the Daily Telegraph and The Spectator, changed citizenship to be made a Lord. No comment. 

This is about journalists’ proper place in society. We journos report and we editorialise, but we do not govern. We are not in the legislature (or ought not to be). We judge a lot, but we are not the judiciary. Journalists are and need to remain — using that self-regarding Americanism — this country’s Fourth Estate. Outsiders with our own look at society, at politics, the economy. Uninfluenced, uninfluenceable. Separate. Uncorrupted by the chance of favour, let alone an ‘honour’.