The New Year's Honours will be appearing in a day
or two, and one award which .ought to be included will not be, because the Prime Minister, who is responsible for these lists, cannot put it there. That is the award of the Order of Merit to the Prime Minister himself. There are at the moment two or three vacancies in the company of the select twenty-five, and it would be absurd to suggest that any candidate exists with stronger claims than Mr. Churchill. He might, indeed, be held to deserve the O.M. on his literary work alone. Nothing could be more satisfactory than that the King should give the Prime Minister the O.M. on his own initiative. I cannot remember whether that was the course followed in 1919 when Mr. Lloyd George, who was Prime Minister at the time, was given the Order of Merit. That was after the end of the last war, but there is no reason in this case for waiting till the war is over. Mr. Churchill's title rests on a range of qualities peculiar to himself.
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