Political commentary
Points of honours
Charles Moore
No doubt it would be priggish to ask what the New Year and Queen's Birth- day Honours are supposed to be for. Almost no British institution is based on a declared general purpose or abstract princi- ple. The characteristically British answer to the question 'why do you x this way?' is not `because we believe in liberty, equality, fraternity [or whatever]'; instead it is to relate the history of the custom, explaining its circumstances and its nuances. So if somebody is unkind enough to ask why Arthur Bottomley should now be elevated to the House of Lords, one answer, and a good one, is to say that people like Arthur Bottomley (unblemished and unmemorable former Cabinet ministers) have been given peerages for a very long time. When Lord Melbourne made his famous remark about the virtue of the Order of the Garter being that there was 'no damn merit about it' he was, one suspects, doing rather more than expressing an aristocratic disdain for hard work: he was pleased with a society so secure in its own habits that it did not look for some external or eternal justification for the rewards that it gave to its own members. So when radicals like Auberon Waugh com- plain of government reluctance to honour P. G. Wodehouse even though he was a great writer, they rather miss the point. A nation where the P. G. Wodehouses came out on top and the Arthur Bottomleys were nowhere would be a dangerously close ap- proximation to Plato's Republic. The latest list holds no such dangers.
Still, the fact that few British institutions can be fully 'explained' or reduced to first principles does not mean that they all to have to be meekly and unquestioningly ac- cepted. Indeed, the.only way in which such institutions can be satisfactorily reformed is by being sufficiently critical to notice how a tradition modifies itself and what the results of that modification are likely to be. In the case of honours, the system has been modified by changing prejudices and fashions. It has now become a very peculiar mixture.
A continuous strand, of course, has been the rewarding of the friends of the power- ful. Clearly Lord McAlpine would not have been made a peer by Mrs Thatcher if he had happened to be Treasurer of the Labour and not the Conservative Party. Equally clearly, most of us see nothing wrong with such an exercise of patronage and would ac- tually think it very odd if Prime Ministers did not exercise it. The honours given to businessmen are a bit hazier. The link bet- ween contributions to the Conservative par- ty and the receipt of knighthoods is not as clear as Labour pretends but it is silly to say that it does not exist. Unfortunately, the prevailing morality is that the hypocrisy of the present situation is preferable to the franker habits of the past when those who wanted honours bought them directly. It might by pushing it a bit to permit people to buy their way into the House of Lords and so to a place in the British constitution, but what would be wrong with selling baronet- cies and knighthoods, which are no more than names? The only solid objection is one recently put to me by a worldly-wise employee of Smith Square — money for the buying of titles would go to the Treasury: at present it goes to the Conservative party.
Then, mixed in with these wreaths of fame and interest, are the honours given disinterestedly. These are the strangest of all, and the ones with the worst effects. These is not much wrong with those given for a clearly unique and more or less uncon- troversial achievement. Sir Edmund Hillary or Dame Margot Fonteyn, perhaps even the man from The Archers, could be said to deserve some recognition, and it might even be that that recognition will encourage future generations to climb mountains or become ballerinas or act yokels. Nor is it wrong to honour public servants who have held high offices honourably, even if without distinction. It is something to be head of the Foreign Office of Master of the Rolls and it should have its acknowledg- ment just as it is a good thing that a long- serving worker gets his gold watch. But when it comes to industry or the univer- sities, the matter becomes less clear. For in such fields, the desire to get an honour could be incompatible with the work that should be done. A number of dons, for in- stance, come to recognise that they can either devote themselves to academic work with its uncertain success, or they can fill committees and help with government reports and secure a gong. Similarly, the dedicated industrialist is supposed to be someone whose only aim is the success of his industry. It is important for that success that he is not beholden to any government, and that he sees his fame and fortune as coming from profit and not from the patronage of politicians.
Of course, Mrs Thatcher's aim in knighting the chairmen of Royal Doulton and the National Freight Corporation and the like is to help industry. Industrialists themselves like to complain about how little their work is recognised in this country. But the only true recognition of an industry's success is the readiness of people to be its customers, and so the only way that a government can help it is to cut its taxes or reduce the other costs that it af- fects. A businessman who becomes a pillar of the establishment is likely to be a less active businessman. Under present arrange- ments, of which the honours system is a minor symptom, the business class is both pampered and squashed. Heads of big com- panies are lionised, but their companies pay gigantic taxes. Smaller companies go out of business because of rates or regulations, yet others, or sometimes the very same firms, are paid large subsidies to go to places where there is no sense in their being and give jobs to people whom there is no sense their employing. Suppose it were declared that no businessman — nor journalist either, for that matter — would ever be honoured. That would in itself be a form of honour, just as a surgeon is proud to be ad- dressed as 'Mr'.
I expect that politicians display an uncer- tain touch with the giving of honours partly because of the well-known post-war condi- tion of anxiety about one's 'role'. The world of the 20th century, especially after 1945, has tended to brood obsessively on the fact that it was supposed to be modern. In less stable countries, this mania has led to revolution, but in England it has merely produced more than a generation of people like Anthony Sampson or Edward Heath for whom modernisation is an end in itself. Such people are too impatient to consider the special gifts of the English political tradition and so are disposed to doubt its efficacy. They have allowed things like honours to continue, because to get rid of them would have been too difficult, but they have been embarrassed by them, and they have tried to overcome that embarrass- ment by updating them. They have been more sensitive to the attacks of other modernisers for their timidity than they have been to the traditions themselves. And so they have always got in a muddle.
But one has until now been able to com- fort oneself that the muddle does not mat- ter too much so long as the fount of honour herself has not shared in it. Quacks have in- spected the anatomy of Britain but they have not cut off its head. The Queen has held fast to a Victorian sense of duty and to a belief in her hereditary right. She, at least, is not confused about her 'role'.
After the Commonwealth Conference, and the royal Christmas message, can one be so sure? According to the Queen, the greatest problem in the world is the gap between the rich and poor countries. This is not the same as saying that poverty is a terrible thing. It is a statement of a Brandt Commis- sion piety, of which the next part, which she duly supplied, is that the world needs more `interdependence'. The Commonwealth, she said, was an example of just such inter- dependence (`worldwide comradeship'). It is not the fact that all this is half platitude and half nonsense that matters so much as the fact that it is of no importance to the only people over whom the Queen has real claims — the people of these islands. We do not want them to start asking what the Queen is supposed to be for.
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