Terence Blacker: When a refusal is more noble than an honour - Terence Blacker - Commentators - The Independent

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Now and then, it is possible to catch a glimpse of how the British establishment works. These moments are rare and fleeting because an unwritten code of confidentiality, of the sort shared by members of the same club, ensures that the rest of us are kept in the dark. Sometimes the confidentiality is mysterious. Why, for example, should the Cabinet Office be so determined to treat as some kind of dark state secret the identity of those who years ago turned down an honour? This week, it emerged that it had taken 15 months of argument around the Freedom of Information Act for Whitehall to release the names of 277 people, all safely dead, who preferred to remain undecorated. Having lost the battle to keep this list of refuseniks under wraps, the Cabinet Office spokesman sounded distinctly flustered. "Numbers are very small," he said. They "represent around 2 per cent of nominations". What a 2 per cent, though. Reading the roll of honour-refusers, one begins to understand why those in power preferred to keep it under wraps. Generals, business luminaries and stalwarts of the civil service may benefit from a title or letters after their names, but those who are their own men and women saw that there was far more to lose than to gain. They are an odd bunch, the 277. JB Priestley, Lucian Freud, Roald Dahl, Robert Graves, FR Leavis, LS Lowry, Graham Greene, Henry Moore, Philip Larkin and CS Lewis have little in common politically or personally beyond the fact that their work is the product of uncompromising individuality. Simply by accepting a bauble of thanks from the nation, they would be sacrificing what was best about them – their apartness. Once they became part of the national community, their voice, their eyes, their strength would be changed. They neither accepted the honour nor, in what has become a new form of boasting, told the world that they had rejected it. One has only to think of the great and the decorated of today – Sir David Hare, Sir Elton John, Dame Helen Mirren, Sir Tim Rice, Lord Prescott, Sir Mick Jagger – to understand the problem. It is as if these people have kicked themselves upstairs, away from where the messy, interesting action is taking place. They are respected, eminent men and women, but they are reduced. Their voices are muffled by ermine. No wonder the Cabinet Office wanted to keep the list of these sensible 277 people hidden.

I always suspect anyone who refuses an honour of being a smug little cunt. Yes, it's a bit of a dilemma because having one makes you look like a stuffy old establishment fart, but you can always accept it and not use it, which is what anyone with any sense does. (If you see anyone non-military wearing a légion d'honneur button, it's basically the equivalent of a sign saying "Warning! Enormous knobhead! Avoid at all costs!")

Of course, in the olden days anyone likely to be put up for one would know in advance, and have the opportunity to hint that they'd really rather not bother. These days I think when they just pick whoever's been on tv lately, I think that happens less.

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The honours list refuseniks who want it both ways - Telegraph

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If the Booker Prize is posh bingo – as Julian Barnes called it before he won it – then turning down an honour is posh poker. This is the high-risk game the great and the good play when they turn down a minor honour, in the hope that they’ll get a bigger one later. The list, published this week, of those who refused an honour from 1951-99 contains some very cool customers indeed. They tend to be from the aesthetic world – artists, writers and actors – because they can take the gamble that the Queen will up the ante if they don’t say yes; if you’re in the Armed Forces or the Foreign Office, when you turn down that knighthood, it’s not going to be offered again, let alone bumped up a few notches in a few years’ time. The late Lucian Freud – a keen racing man, incidentally – played a blinder. He turned down a CBE in 1977, only to scoop a Companionship of Honour in 1983 and the Order of Merit in 1993. Painters, generally, are pretty good at posh poker. David Hockney turned down a knighthood in 1990, only to get the Companionship of Honour in 1997 and the Order of Merit earlier this month. You can appreciate Hockney’s game. Unlike knighthoods, the CH and the OM are pretty exclusive. There are a maximum 65 CHs at any one time, and only 25 OMs. Also, unlike knighthoods, neither honour makes it awkward to address a recipient. But then, some people relish the awkwardness. And here we must touch upon the Ben Kingsley School of Posh Poker – or the Sir Ben Kingsley School, as he would have it. When Kingsley was knighted in 2001, he took the diametrically opposite course to the traditional English approach – that is, he showed off about it. Early posters for his 2006 film, Lucky Number Slevin, even had him billed as Sir Ben Kingsley. Related Articles 116 people snubbed honours in past three years 26 Jan 2012 The secret list of people who turned down honours 25 Jan 2012 People who snubbed honours from the Queen: list in full 25 Jan 2012 Tory party donor 'shocked' by controversy 07 Jan 2012 Knighted businessmen: in pictures 07 Jan 2012 Other followers of the Ben Kingsley School have even made the cardinal error of including their title in their email address – the late Alan Walters, Margaret Thatcher’s economic guru, managed to slip the “Sir” into his. You could – almost – feel sorry for Kingsley and Walters. They hadn’t absorbed the central, disingenuous paradox at the heart of the British honour system. It is a natural human desire to want to be rewarded for your achievements and to be recognised by your fellow human beings for your success. And yet Commandment Number One of the British Honours System is: “Thou Must Not Show Off.” The correct solution to this paradox is to accept an honour and then look as if you couldn’t care less about it, like Sir Roger Moore, who prefers to be called Rog on film sets. George Mikes, the Hungarian émigré author of How to be an Alien, the 1946 observational comic book about the British, summed up the position: “If you want to be a modern Englishman, you must become class-conscious. If you belong to the so-called higher spheres of society you will, of course, never be flagrant about this. You simply look down upon those miserable and ridiculous creatures who do not know the conventions of your world.” There is a posh poker trick, though, that trumps even this approach – and that is, to refuse to play the game at all; to keep on turning down the offers as the monarch pulls more and more gilded medals from her handbag. The master of the I’m Not Playing routine was the painter L S Lowry. He holds the record for honours turned down. He refused the OBE in 1955, the CBE in 1961, a knighthood in 1968, and the Companionship of Honour twice, in 1972 and 1976. Born plain Laurence Stephen Lowry in Lancashire in 1887, he died plain Laurence Stephen Lowry in Derbyshire in 1976. There is nothing more distinguished than the Lowry Approach and, in order for it to remain so, you must not let on that you’ve turned down the honour; Lowry never did. That sort of admirable behaviour is in a quite superior category to those who accept an award and then publicly send it back; like the journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who returned her MBE in 2003 in protest at the Iraq War, or John Lennon, who returned his MBE in 1969 because of British involvement in the “Nigeria-Biafra thing” and British support of America in Vietnam. This lot are getting two bites at the cherry: one shot of publicity when they receive their honour, another when they showily send it back – real pride-that-apes humility stuff. There is only one thing worse: the John Prescott Get-Out Clause. Prescott defended his 2010 peerage by saying, “I’m against too much flunkery and titles. But Paul [his wife, Pauline] would like me to.” It’s fine to admit you love playing posh poker or, even better, to refuse to play it at all. But pretending you don’t like the game, and then playing it for all it’s worth? Where’s the honour in that?

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Standard disclaimer: the disgusting statements contained in this post are the views of the poster, and unless specified do not represent the views of the moderators or the site's owners.