Mailwatch(ed) Forum

Is Glenda a dame or is she still too cool for school?

As ridiculous as the honours system is, some people deserve recognition and the joy it brings them

I've said this before, but the easiest way round the hooha of "Oh, former PM X has been given this honour, but former PM Y hasn't" is just make it a guarantee that when you leave office, you get knighted or become a Dame instantly, and then offered a place in the Lords when you stop being an MP. No matter who it's, it's always going to upset someone.

Same when they eventually die. Give them a state funeral for "services to the nation" or similar - that's what the Americans do. However if they have expressly wished no fuss, then respect their wishes. (Lest we forget, the Thatcher family didn't want a fuss, because that's what Mags had said herself. It was only down to the Bruges Group and the Mail shrieking that we got what we did).

Of course, the caveat to that is you don't get that if you've utterly devastated the country or been kicked out in total disgrace. So that rules out the current occupant of Downing Street and the former occupant of the White House. Mind you, Nixon was seen off with full honours.

Yebbut Nixon was the first US president to visit communist China and start thawing relations between West and East. And what he was impeached for was nothing compared to what Trump has done.

Youngian wrote: ↑Sun Jan 02, 2022 12:26 am As ridiculous as the honours system is, some people deserve recognition and the joy it brings them

Indeed, it is utterly ridiculous, especially all the nonsense about empires and chess pieces.

That said, my daughter's grandmother was honoured a few years ago for her work concerning credit unions in Glasgow. It brought her a level of recognition and personal satisfaction that money simply cannot buy.

Let me guess. The person who started this petition is a member of a grass-roots political organisation - three syllables, starts with "M".

More than 500,000 people have signed a petition calling for Tony Blair to be stripped of his knighthood.

The former prime minister was made a Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, an appointment personally made by the Queen, in the New Year’s Honours list...


...Over 500,000 people have signed a petition calling for the honour to be revoked, saying the former Labour PM caused “irreparable damage to both the constitution of the United Kingdom and to the very fabric of the nation’s society...

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/sir- ... 0.html?amp

twats

My bold.

And they haven't caught on that the government has no say in this as the Order of the Garter is in the monarch's gift.

@Malcolm Armsteen What did you expect? The one thing Momentalists have taught us over the last six years is that there are a hell of a lot of people who have absolutely no idea about how the world works.

Starmer was asked about Blair’s knighthood. He deserves one and Boris Johnson doesn’t, he replied. If Keir was asked if every PM apart from Johnson and Cameron should receive one, his answer would probably be yes.

Isn't it a token award given to every PM after they step down from the post?

Anyway, Labour were polling well so it's opportune time for a bit of leftist infighting. Cheers Momentum

Up to Thatcher, it was standard to make a departing PM a life peer (Eden as Lord Avon, MacMillan as Lord Stockton etc). Heath stayed on as an MP, while Callaghan was ennobled after standing down as an MP. Churchill, famously, was offered the title of Duke of London, but declined, saying that it wasn't fitting having been awarded "the order of the boot" by the public).

Major didn't get such an honour - not sure why, but it may just have been a change in general attitudes. Whatever the case, Blair didn't get anything and as for his successors I suppose it could have been seen as "rewarding failure".

George Smith (aka Ian Dunkin' Cough) was knighted just for having been leader of the Conservatives, never having been PM or even fought a general election...

Any old backbench doffer from the shires can get knighted. Although its all too crass to care about, David Cameron getting anything will make my blood boil.

Malcolm Armsteen wrote: ↑Tue Jan 04, 2022 3:01 pm George Smith (aka Ian Dunkin' Cough) was knighted just for having been leader of the Conservatives, never having been PM or even fought a general election...

Given his extensive history of CV padding, it was only a matter of time before he gave himself one.


(Though, on that precedent, we should be seeing Corbyn elevated soon enough. That'll be fun to watch)

For such an unimportant relic of a bygone era, they don't half get wound up about it.

I imagine that Corbyn would refuse a knighthood - there's so much kudos to reap from an honour refused, oh the 'umbleness, the humility of the man...
It would cement his place in the Cult forever. The secular equivalent of a beatification.

Chile might award him the Order of Bernardo O'Higgins, though. Very prestidigitatious.

Simon Jenkins spekes his branes on why the queen waited so long before giving Tony his gong.

https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... -is-broken

In the light of history, Blair was not a peculiarly bad prime minister. In winning three general elections he might even be rated a success

This is generous of him.

The queen is sending a lightly coded message by creating Sir Tony.

He may not be flavour of the week, but take a look at the shitshows one has had to suffer since he resigned.,

The Grauniad is really pulling out the stops over this Sir Tony bollocks.

Tony Blair’s former defence secretary Geoff Hoon has claimed he was told to burn a memo from the attorney general that cast doubt on the legality of the Iraq war.

In revelations that critics say cast further doubt on the decision to award the former prime minister a knighthood, Hoon recalled in extracts from his recently published memoir that Blair’s chief of staff had instructed him to burn the document...

https://amp.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... n-could-be

Is the paper run by swivel-eyed moonhowling Corbynites, or something? They really have the daggers out for him.

While I'm no fan of Tony, I'm no fan of Geoff Hoon either.

Hoon wrote in his memoir, See How They Run, that he had had been under pressure from Mike Boyce, the chief of defence staff, to provide him with clear legal direction that his forces could take action in Iraq, in lieu of a UN resolution authorising force, the Daily Mail reported.


He claims to have received a copy of complex advice from the then attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, which was “very long and very detailed legal opinion”.

He wrote: “I was sent a copy from Downing St under conditions of considerable secrecy. I was told that it was for my eyes only and that I should not discuss its contents with anyone else. I had no idea who else had received a copy.”

So far, so normal.

“Moreover, when my principal private secretary, Peter Watkins, called Jonathan Powell in Downing St and asked what he should now do with the document, he was told in no uncertain terms that he should ‘burn it’.”

Still nothing to see here. I find it hard to believe the SofS and his advisors did not know the MOD has standard procedures in place for the destruction of classified material.

Hoon said the document was not burned. “I agreed that we should lock the document securely into an MoD safe to which only he had access. For all I know it is probably still there.”

This is nothing short of criminal. That a top-classification document was not disposed of properly, and may well be lying around waiting for someone to find it? The mind boggles.

But yeah. All War Criminal Tony's fault.

Addendum

It's a sign of the Grauniad's desperation that they indulge in churnalism of this sort. The deputy political editor is regurgitating a story from the Daily fucking Mail, a paper which has absolutely no history of distorting or sensationalising non-stories to make them appear more sinister.

I can hear Mrs Haywood* now: "Check your sources."



* Teacher and Head of History Department when I was doing my O Level history.