No royal visit for the working class
Ian Waller
THE QUEEN HAS BEEN PLEASED by John Walker
Seeker & Warburg, £9.95
For nearly a thousand years British monarchs have been dispensing honours to raise money, award friends or win new allies — originally for themselves, in more recent centuries at the behest of politicians bent on the same ends. Today's honours lists may lack the verve with which the Stuarts would create 200 knights in a day or the straightforward corruption of Lloyd George's creations. But the basic principle of oiling the political machine at someone else's expense by pandering to human vanity remains unchanged. Nor, judging by the bemedalled chests of African or Soviet politicos, is it a peculiarly British foible; it is probably less pernicious than American job patronage.
What distinguishes our system are the subtle gradations, related more to class and station in life than merit or service, and operated by bureaucrats dedicated to look- ing after their own: civil servants make up a sixtieth of the population but collect a sixth of the awards. But of the thousand or so dished out in each of the twice-yearly lists it is the five per cent unashamedly in the gift of the prime minister of the day that attract the most attention or notoriety — with each contributing a distinctive flavour.
Harold Macmillan lavished them with a lofty but often maliciously calculated dis- dain. He revelled in offending Whitehall susceptibilities by giving his press secret- ary, Harold Evans, a baronetcy rather than the knighthood that — at most — his level in the hierarchy dictated. Harold Wilson had a taste for cronies and rich business- men of central European and Jewish ori- gins, some of whom came to a sticky end either in the courts or by their own hands. Some of their subventions went, inciden- tally, towards a proper office at the Com- mons when he went into Opposition, rather than party funds, a need now rightly recognised and paid for by the state. Edward Heath was distinctly parsimo- nious, which did him no good when his leadership came under question.
Mrs Thatcher's particular contribution according to Mr John Walker's well resear- ched study of the system, The Queen Has Been Pleased, has been to establish a systematic and calculated relationship be- tween titles and money for Tory party funds. The facts speak for themselves. The 11 peerages she created between 1979 and 1985 went to men whose companies had donated £1.9 million over five years; 44 of the 64 knighthoods went to companies giving £4.4 million. There seems to be something akin to a tariff. The boards of ten companies contributing over £200,000 collected six peerages and five knight- hoods, the ten next most generous got eight knighthoods. Sometimes the associa- tion seems even more direct — in 1984 Distillers gave £50,000, the next year its then chairman got his K.
In Lloyd George's time the money, however ill-gotten by wartime profiteers, at least usually came out of their own pockets; under Mrs Thatcher titles are bought at the expense, and without the consent, of shareholders. A great deal more undoubtedly flows from business sources for, although companies are obliged to disclose political donations over £250, there is no central registration by the certification officer as the law requires of the unions, nor does the Conservative Party or its front organisations reveal donors' names. Mr Walker's researches cover only a fraction of the 600,000 reports published annually and many lesser de- corations must go in return for more modest donations.
The invidious class-orientated nature of the system is illustrated by the different treatment of a permanent secretary and some pillar of local community or doer of good works. The former may get a peerage on retiring with an index-linked pension; he will certainly have made several visits to the Palace to collect awards judged appropriate to each upward step in his career . . . CMG . . . KCMG . . . GCMG. The latter appears in the list but not for a Royal order; instead it is the British Empire Medal, a category reserved for those who in the official wording 'do not qualify by rank for higher awards'. In other words, working class.
More to the point, perhaps, he will not even get a visit to the Palace since it is the only award the Queen does not present personally. Instead, it is handed over by a departmental minister probably in some dingy provincial office. In 1948 an official committee noted the 'disappointment' felt over this distinction and 'of the immense amount of pleasure . . . and greatly en- hanced value of the awards' that would follow from a royal investiture.
King George VI implemented this in respect of the other lowly orders, MBE and OBE, but not the BEM. I cannot believe this continuing discrimination, with its undertones of class distinction, can be the wish of a Queen who has done so much to bring the monarchy closer to the people or that she would not find it more agree- able than bestowing accolades on party hacks. It would be a step towards the long overdue simplification of the ridiculous proliferation and variety of titles largely invented by Queen Victoria and George V. They now have a distinctly Ruritanian ring.
There is surely no reason to continue the Whitehall promotion charade, for the reci- pients are merely doing their work (pre- sumably) well and, like anywhere else, a salary increase should be ample reward until retirement. They should certainly cease being in the control of the prime minister for whom the power to deny — a reverse form of patronage — can (and Whitehall alleges is) being increasingly used by Mrs Thatcher to punish those who cross her path. The curbing of political honours would establish the principle that the Queen's honours really are society's recognition of merit. Mrs Thatcher wants a share-owning society but she is not entitled to expect that its members should be forced to contribute to the Conservative Central Office.
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