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Boris’s predecessor as editor, Frank Johnson, commented, ‘The point is that Max Hastings has supported the re-election of Tony Blair. End of story. Thatcher’s and Blair’s honours to journalists are the most politicised since Lloyd George. Not that I begrudge Max his gong. I think that everyone in this life who manifestly craves a gong as much as Max did should have one.’
Frank says that if he was offered a gong, ‘I should accept unhesitatingly’. But he also takes the bracing view that there is ‘no damned merit’, not just, as Lord Melbourne said, in the Order of the Garter, but in all honours. This is a pleasantly traditional line, and is one of the few ways in which recipients of honours can hope to remain modest. Soldiers decorated in the second world war generally avoid describing what feats of arms they performed by remarking that the medals ‘came up with the rations’.
As soon as one starts to regard honours as a serious and exactly calibrated measure of merit, instead of as an amusing but essentially arbitrary form of decoration, one is on the road to perdition. It would be absurd to change the present system of awarding them ‘ to throw out Sir Hayden and his chums ‘ for no other committee could be expected to do better than they do, and any committee which pretended to be ‘democratic’ and ‘transparent’ would almost certainly do much, much worse. As a likely recipient of one of the honours to be published this New Year said, on being asked what kind of distinction might deserve such recognition, ‘I don’t know. Anything I could say would sound ludicrous. You are as aware as I am of the absurdity of this business, and clearly anyone confronted by a prize of this sort, well, it’s something of a toss-up whether to accept, but it seems rather churlish to say no.’
Sir Harold Nicolson said much the same on being offered a knighthood in 1952 after the publication of his life of King George V: ‘To maintain my objections might be considered churlish and embarrassing.’ But according to his diary, he derived no pleasure from being made a Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order:
Why is it that I hate so much being congratulated on my KCVO? Partly natural shyness. Partly because it is embarrassing to express pleasure about something one loathes. And partly a conceited feeling that after all the work I have done in life, a knighthood is a pitiful business, putting me in the third eleven…. I feel as if I had got a fourth prize in scripture when I should have liked the Newcastle [Senior Classics Prize at Eton].
Young men tend to be contemptuous of honours, while old men often end up accepting them. The establishment flatters them into becoming pillars of it in the end. As a young man in the 1890s, almost half a century before he himself accepted a knighthood, Max Beerbohm claimed, ‘At present, there is no class more covetous of knighthood than that new class of writers which has come in on the wave of popular education.’ He instanced Mr Flimflam, a popular novelist who is continually in search of publicity:
After his lecturing-tour through the States, he must be off either to Venice, of which he is very fond, for a well-earned rest, or to Stoke Poges, in order that he may put the finishing touches to his new mediaeval novel, in which (it is an open secret) he love of Dante for Beatrice will be treated in a new and startling manner, though with all that reverence and wealth of local colour for which Mr Flimflam’s name is guarantee. Interviewed (or his name is not Flimflam) he must perpetually be, and for every interview he must be specially photographed with his favourite pipe…. It matters not what title he receive, so it be one which will perish, like his twaddle, with him.
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