Oh please, Sir! Are these honours the best we can do?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/14/honours-system-flawed

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Massive congratulations to all of those on whom the Queen has bestowed an honour on the occasion of her Birthday. Apologies if I haven’t quite got the protocol spot on here, but I can only try my best. In truth I’m all at sea, simultaneously attracted, yet repelled, by the honours system.

So while I’m sort of psyched for Sir Lenny Henry and Frank Lampard OBE, a big part of me is going “Sir Van Morrison”? Really? A little bit of my love for the relentlessly grumpy former hellraiser has just been extinguished.

Besides, if we ever do meet I will not be able to call him “Sir”. It’s not rudeness on my part, or because I determinedly campaign against honours as a Ruritanian colonial relic. My mouth just won’t form the words.

I tried once when I was on TV with Lord Alan Sugar (back then a simple Sir). But I just couldn’t say “siralan” with the ease of an Apprentice contestant because in a private hallucination my forefathers appeared. Some held pitchforks, some with a quiet Fenian presence. It would’ve felt like an act of forelock-tugging betrayal to utter the word.

But it’s complicated. When my friend’s mum was awarded an OBE for her game-changing charity work, I felt elated. And we all said the same thing: “It’s great how they [presumably meaning the Palace] are really starting to award people who truly deserve it.” And who would ever begrudge the amazing people who work tirelessly for their communities their day out at the palace in a fascinator?

I also appreciate that there’s been some effort to reform the honours system. Some of the more flagrantly snobbish awards have been tweaked; for instance, the British Empire Medal is no longer awarded by a civil servant (as opposed to being awarded by the Queen) to those who don’t “qualify” for other medals.

But there’s only so much you can do to reform and improve an awards process – and although we may categorise the honours system as a sort of divine-right magical process, it is just an awards process, and this one has many challenges.

Its ongoing popularity is often held up as a reason for its survival. But the popularity of the honours system is to some extent enforced. I don’t take the London Gazette, but I’ll be fed the list anyway, because it’s become a media event. Meanwhile, we’re told, only a small number of people each year refuse the offer of an award, usually for personal reasons.

A friend who is a speaker’s agent thinks that those who say no are chumps, because the honour will only boost their engagement diary and their speaker’s fee. But they’re not chumps. They’re champs, and they should be celebrated for this very reason. As Coco Chanel once put it, elegance is refusal. Mine isn’t an ascetic objection to awards – quite the opposite.

In the 1980s I won the primary school cup for spoken English and the Fire Safety Shield in the same year, so I know what it’s like to be decorated. Nothing since, admittedly, but I am still very pro-award.

In fact, I think we should be rewarding and celebrating more people, but in new and different ways. Why should this flawed system be our pre-eminent way of saying thank you? Is there really nothing like a dame?