Last word
Honorific
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
This week's Spectator is the last issue of 1978. By the time, d.v., my next column appears, you will have read the New Year's Honours List. I imagine that if I . . well, I think I would have heard by now. There we are. Another year gone by. As is well known, anyone can write in to the official at 10 Downing Street to make suggestions for the Honours List. It's something which I have always meant to do, but never get around to. There are unaccountable omissions, especially in the fields of music and letters, even if it is no longer true, as Orwell complained thirty-five years ago, that no writer of any consequence had been honoured since Tennyson. Whether one can, shall we say, advance one's own name is another matter. Perhaps a gentle hint is in order.
In other times these things were arranged more directly. Even then problems arose. There is a story that the whisky millionaire Jimmy Buchanan was offered a peerage by Maundy Gregory, Lloyd George's honours salesman. He had heard that Gregory had a tendency to knock his punters: to take the money but fail to arrange the honour. Obviously enough, this was not a contract easy to enforce in law. Buchanan found a simple expedient. He wrote a cheque to the Lloyd George Political Fund, dated it 1 January 1922, and signed it 'Woolavington: The story may be apocryphal, though Buchanan sounds an engaging fellow in general: he used to say that his motto in life was. Do right and fear no man; don't write and fear no woman. That is by the way.
My impression is that most people would not mind some honour or other, even if the craving is a secret one. Some men genuinely despise honours along with the other trinkets of Vanity Fair. A.E. Housman, R.H. Tawney and Stanley Morison all rejected the offer of honours with varying degrees of scorn. Of course, there are baubles and baubles. While Sir Harold Wilson gleefully accepted the Garter, I cannot imagine Mr Michael Foot doing so. On the other band he invariably sports the badge of the National Union of Mineworkers in his buttonhole, though I don't think Michael Bach has done any more hours at the coalface than you or I have.
Nor is the craving for badges and names surprising, nor reprehensible. nor necessarily a sign of social insecurity. Watkins writes supra that people of what were once called humble orins tend to exercise themselves over social niceties. Which is true; but, as Beethoven and Groucho Marx both observed (on different occasions), the reverse is also true. There is the example of Sir Walter Elliot of Kellynch Hall to remind us that men of birth (perhaps that's a 'once called' phrase, too) can care very much indeed about society and their own position in it.
So, to come to the point, what would one like? There are the various Orders which provide initials after your name, like the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, to give it its full title. But, as Nancy Mitford remarked when she was given her CBE, 'I didn't think there was a BE any more.' The Most Honourable Order of the Bath is nice enough, but I don't like the look of the star (or stars). Then there are the Most Exalted Order of the Star of India and the Most Eminent Order of the Indian Empire, but I have a hunch that they have fallen into desuetude, as the phrase has it. The Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George would be even more fun, especially as it has such a sensible motto: Auspicium melioris aevi. One might work one's way up through the ranks, CMG, KCMG, GCMG (or, as the Foreign Office joke had it, Call Me God, Kindly Call Me God, God Calls Me God). But the necessary connection, however tenuous, with foreign parts might be difficult to maintain.
Let us set our sights a little higher: at the baronetage and the peerage. Of course, there haven't been any hereditary honours created for some years now, and some say there never will be again. But why not? This might be taken as a touchstone of Mrs Thatcher's determination to put the clock back. Who would not rather be an hereditary peer than a life peer? Perhaps there are not many men of high distinction among the hereditary peerage, but there are arguably as many as there are among the life peers. Some of my best friends are life peers, but there really is rather a high proportion of failed politicians, clapped-out trade unionists and — ah — entrepreneurial friends of Lady Falkender.
Just what kind of peerage does one want, then? For my own part the answer is clear: an Irish peerage. The enormous advantage of an Irish peerage is that you have all the pleasure of a title but no legislative responsibilities. Peers of Ireland with no subsidiary Imperial title, though they may sit in the House of Commons — as Palmerston and more recently Winterton did (not that anyone in his right mind wants to sit in the Commons nowadays) — do not sit in the Lords.
Peerages of Ireland were created up to the Act of Union of 1800 (rather freely created: you may observe how many Irish titles date from the very last years before the Union, as the old Ascendancy class was bought off). However, the Irish Peerage was not extinguished as a living (or ongoing) institution, as the Scotch Peerage had been in 1707. There is a curious and littleknown Article of the Act: At all times after the union it shall and may be lawful for his Majesty and his heirs to keep up the peerage of that part of the United. Kingdom called Ireland to the number of one hundred.' Under the original provision of the Act one Irish title could be created fof every three that became extinct. This pro" vision was used quite often in the nineteenth century: there are a dozen" peerages extant which date from after 181T The reason was sometimes to grant a f.lue while leaving its holder the option of sitting in the Commons. Such was the intention when Curzon was made an Irish Peer in 1898 before his departure for India as Vic" eroy, though in fact he never returned to thet House, which was one reason — though the only one — why he never became Ptilne minister. (Curzon's various titles present an extraordinarily complicated episode ill peerage law: I suspect that, as Palmerston said of the Schleswig-Holstein quest00. only three men ever understood the rilaTr; one's dead, one went mad and I've 1°.gotten.) By my count there are today seventy-orlet, Irish peers who are not Peers of Parliainel the count being taken from the inc,°,111; parable and indispensable Dod's ra: liamentary Companion which verYPrOcrjYt lists them all. The Fourth Article of the Acs of Union is not prescriptive: the Queen,v3, the heir and successor of George flish doesn't have to create twenty-nine newl',if'xi peerages. But if she wants to she can. svoe year: Lords Shanagarry, Knockmeald°, is Ballinskelligh? (Lord Bloody Forelatlo e0 going too far.) 'At all events, as Irishd Pc,bh. don't normally say: Nollaig fe shona ill
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