IT is hard to know which of Sir Sadiq Khan’s achievements as Mayor of London most justifies the knighthood bestowed on him in the New Year Honours list.
Presiding over a 25 per cent increase in violent crime, perhaps?
Increasing the Mayor’s precept — the slice of Londoners’ council tax which goes to him and the Greater London Authority — by more than 70 per cent?
Paying a “night tsar” £130,000 a year to increase the vitality of London’s nightlife — while venues close by the dozen?
Making life impossible, through the Ulez expansion, for the many low-income tradespeople and shift workers living in outer London who have no option but to commute in by car (leading to a 9.8 per cent increase in the cost of employing a plumber or electrician)?
These are all tremendous achievements, of course. But what surely earned Khan a gong all by itself is his sheer hypocrisy.
Three years ago, if you remember, Khan started doling out £25,000 grants to neighbourhoods in order to change the names of their streets from fuddy-duddy 19th-century military heroes to more relevant and “diverse” figures.
It was all part of his efforts to “decolonise” London, which also included appointing a Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm to nominate statues of long-dead heroes to be toppled from their pedestals.
So why has he suddenly decided to accept the title of Knight of the Order of the British Empire?
He has turned himself into an agent of all he professes to detest about Britain’s colonial legacy.
How easy it is to win over the firebrands of the Left when you flatter them with honours.
They quickly make accommodation with their hated class system then.
Just look at Mary Bousted, former Joint General Secretary of the hard-Left National Education Union.
As well as calling numerous strikes and demanding that schools remained closed, even when Covid cases were down to a trickle in the summer of 2020, she, too, has demanded “decolonisation” of the national curriculum.
What has Emily Thornberry done to deserve a Damehood? Starmer evidently thought so little of her that he declined to appoint her to his Cabinet.
But that hasn’t stopped her accepting a peerage — an honour which she surely thinks reeks of colonialism and privilege.
So many of the names on Sir Keir Starmer’s first New Year Honours list as Prime Minister have been rewards for failure.
What has Emily Thornberry done to deserve a Damehood?
Starmer evidently thought so little of her that he declined to appoint her to his Cabinet, even though she had served in several frontbench roles in Opposition, including Shadow Foreign Secretary.
Yet having decided she wasn’t up to a real job, Starmer has awarded her a high honour instead.
I am sure the people of Strood, who she insulted in a tweet during a by-election there a decade ago, are burning to fall on their knees to mark their respect.
Then there is a knighthood for Andrew Haines, the £590,000-a-year CEO of Network Rail, who has been honoured in spite of a sharp rise in delays — with one in 20 rail services being cancelled, or failing to call at one or more scheduled stops, in the year to November.
Meanwhile, there is a Damehood for Patricia Hewitt, a former Health Secretary in Tony Blair’s Cabinet, who was later suspended from the Parliamentary Labour Party over a lobbying scandal.
Hewitt’s other great contribution to public life was to serve as General Secretary of the National Council for Civil Liberties in the 1970s, when it was affiliated to a group openly calling itself the Paedophile Information Exchange. She later admitted she had been a bit “naive”.
To be fair, there are some deserving names on the honours list — such as campaigners for the sub-postmasters falsely accused of fraud and theft — who receive OBEs.
But they get rather lost among the usual litany of time-servers, political placemen and prime ministerial cronies.
The gongs revealed yesterday were in addition to the peerages announced two weeks ago, including one for Sue Gray, who Starmer removed as his Chief of Staff after three months in the job, and Thangam Debbonaire, a former Labour MP whose most remarkable contribution to national life was to lose her seat on a night when her party won a landslide.
Under Starmer, the main function of an honour appears to be a consolation prize to make your P45 a little more palatable.
It would be a disgraceful way for any prime minister to use the honours system, but it is especially objectionable given that the current PM is simultaneously engaged in a high-minded mission to rid the House of Lords of its remaining hereditary peers.
Starmer promised to renew Britain and blow away Tory sleaze. Instead, by showering his cronies with honours, he has emulated their worst practices.
I don’t care much for the idea of legislation being picked over by earls and viscounts, and am quite happy to see them put out to grass.
But Starmer had the opportunity to properly modernise our democracy and introduce a fully elected House of Lords.
Instead, he has chosen to make the Upper House, and the wider honours system, even grubbier than it already is.
Starmer promised to renew Britain and blow away Tory sleaze.
Instead, by showering his cronies with honours, he has emulated their worst practices.
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