I’ve long loathed the idea of the ‘National Treasure’. Even typing the words made my eyes briefly cross with extreme crossness. You know the type, they are wheeled out every Christmas as we huddle around the television. Though they can be anything from actors to zoologists, they will have one loathsome character trait in common; they were all massively ambitious when young, but they like to pretend that their success was somehow organic and that only other – shallow, grasping – people are driven by attention-seeking and greedy for money.

Anneliese Dodds, the former Labour Minister for Women who was unable to explain what a woman was, has been made a Dame, which seems a bit binary

And what is a National Treasure’s ultimate goal? A New Year Honour: a lovely shiny gong, stuck on you by the head honcho himself, to show hoi polloi how special you are. Of course, this isn’t true of all those who get a gong. My immensely brave first father-in-law, Victor Parsons, went to Buckingham Palace, aged just 20, to be awarded the Distinguished Service Medal by King George VI. This military medal for bravery was the exact opposite of a New Year Honour bauble. To quote his son, the writer Tony Parsons, here’s what happened:

‘You’ve done very well, Parsons,’ King George VI told my father just before he presented his DSM.

My old man indicated the rows of medals on the King’s chest.

‘You haven’t done so bad yourself,’ said my dad, and the pair of them had a laugh about that.’

One wonders if the present monarch would take a similar bit of good-humoured joshing regarding his lack of military action, while being festooned with medals. Queen Victoria certainly wouldn’t have been amused. She started the New Year Honours awards in 1890; she had become Empress of India in 1876, making her the ruler of more than 250 million people, despite never once visiting the place. You don’t have to be Owen Jones to find this a bit of a cheek, which makes it all the more mystifying that people who quite rightly abhor the idea of one country being ruled by another clamour to get their paws on awards which all have the dreaded........

© The Spectator