Damehood. A cosy name that conceals some dubious choices

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/04/new-years-honours-lists-dames-non-deserving

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Even outside the pantomime season, or possibly because of the pantomime season, no honour, out of the blizzard of honorific acronyms and archaisms that surges bianually out of Buckingham Palace, is cherished like that of dame. Or, to be formal, Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire – a body that still exists in the world of national honours, along with that Downtonesque speciality item, the Royal Victorian Order, whose various classes scientifically accord with the royal household’s higher and lower ranks. Consider the offence that might be caused to, say, a Sandringham forestry foreman, forced to share an honour with Sir David Manning.

Maybe it is the contrast between these absurdities, and damehood’s cosier, far more inclusive associations with aprons, wisdom, occasional shouts of “behind you”, that allows new beneficiaries to exult to a point that might sound immodest were they alluding, say, to a future of being called sir or milord. “I am beyond thrilled and beyond excited,” says new dame, Joan Collins. Even Doris Lessing, in the wonderful letter in which she turned down a damehood, exclaimed “And yet … how pleasant to be a dame! I would adore it. Dame of what?” Given “what” appeared to be the British empire, Lessing felt she should excuse herself: “When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia.”

More recently, Woman’s Hour’s Dame Jenni Murray, after worrying about class betrayal, decided that a damehood is worth the suspension of certain personal misgivings, an accommodation for which she was congratulated by Dame Joan Bakewell. “Surely life is about doing the best you can with the chances your background presents you with,” Dame Joan argued, “and an honour is recognition you have done that.” Think of your damehood less as a compromise, then, and more in the language of the repulsive prime location ad: “This is your trophy ... this is your reward and deservedly so.”

Any woman who hopes to achieve damehood with a minimum of inner torment will want to study Joan Collins, whose foremost political acts appear to be her contributions to the Spectator and occasional outbursts against the modern world. For the aspiring dame, the selectors’ reverence for acting over all other extra-governmental careers, even sporting ones, indicates performance (take royal/upscale roles for preference) as the most reliable route, with or without some low-key charitable work, undertaken, in common with Britain’s millions of nameless volunteers, with no thought of public acclaim.

Some say, given a literal-mindedness in honours distribution that evidently benefits individuals who have come top in running races or who regularly act being haughty, that it was Dame Joan’s interpretation of Queen Rat in the Birmingham Hippodrome’s Dick Whittington that secured her place on the latest list. But one expert, the former distributor of honours, Sir Hayden Phillips, has argued that honours are: “Our way in the United Kingdom of saying thank you publicly to those who have ‘gone the extra mile’ in their service or who stand out ‘head and shoulders’ above others.”

So it is presumably for a celebrated performance in the The Stud, the pornographic movie in which a naked Dame Joan stood out by bravely feigning sex on a swing, that both the honours committee’s Sir Bob Kerslake and the Queen felt compelled to thank her, on all our behalves, exalting her over colleagues such as Julie Walters, Victoria Wood, and Helen McCrory. To say nothing of eligible non-actors whose achievements come equally quickly to mind; Nicola Benedetti, Diana Athill, JK Rowling, Judith Kerr, Angela Hewitt, Dr Anita Brookner, Cornelia Parker, Sarah Waters, Joanna Hogg (assuming none of them rejected damehoods).

As it is, this season’s other dames include Dianne Thompson, who ran the National Lottery, an executive from Nestlé, for services to Kit Kats, and another actor, Kristin Scott Thomas, whose qualifications for eminence are unquestioned thanks to gracious performances in A Handful of Dust, Gosford Park and, imminently, in The Audience (as the Queen).

The secrecy of the British honours system, with its tradition of idiocy and colonialism, snobbery and taint, now requires much of each batch of knighthoods, commanders, and so forth, to be received with Sir Jimmy Savile, Rolf Harris (OBE, MBE, CBE) or Fred Goodwin-induced caution. The modest sound of a damehood, however – along with the righteous spectacle of a gender imbalance being corrected – still ensures that the average new dame will find the world beaming right back at this purported triumph for equality/the working classes/her grandchildren.

She is unlikely to be asked, as Armando Iannucci OBE was, about an apparent rearrangement of her attitudes; or why anyone, other than a helicopter pilot, would risk being awarded a prize by Prince William; or what, exactly, has engendered this unlikely respect for a selection process that just forgot all about volunteers working with Ebola patients. The more famous nominees will say, as always, how lovely it is to be “recognised”, and no one will point out that, actually, we knew who they were already.

What, if not this tendresse for dames, persuaded the BBC’s Today programme to invite the not notably engaging Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, a former Conservative candidate with grim views about the limitations posed by an “obscure background”, to guest-edit? By chance, thanks to official determination to honour her fellow lawyer, fellow sex inquiry drop-out, and now, fellow dame, Fiona Woolf, the programme’s instant dame-facility could not have been more timely. With the alacrity of a Widow Twankey suddenly called upon to defend fellow guild-member, Mother Goose, Today’s guest editor upheld Woolf’s damification as an establishment inevitability.

“It’s very unfair. She was Lord Mayor of London,” said the senior dame, inviting us to reflect, perhaps for the first time, on the unsung martyrdom that is lord mayoral service. “She’s only the second woman ever to be Lord Mayor of London and the very least the honours system could do would be to honour a woman who’s got such a distinguished post.” Evidently, in the years since Woolf’s male predecessor, Nick Anstee, exited the Mansion House in the manner of Dick Whittington, without honours, parity with Joan Collins has been ordained by a system whose overriding preoccupation, Woolf’s promotion confirms, is the bestowal of establishment, not popular, approval. Its more impressive beneficiaries – currently the Poet Laureate, Dame Carol Ann Duffy, and Dame Marina Warner – return the compliment, by lending reputational lustre to official partiality and caprice.

Of course it is all too easy for a person who will never be offered an honour, and so never subject to temptation, to scorn such exchanges. What luck, then, to find the toweringly meritorious figure of Thomas Piketty, the French economist, encapsulating the objections in his rejection of the of the Legion d’Honneur. “I do not think it is the government’s role to decide who is honourable.” And the fact that an honour is women-only, with an adorable, pantomime name, changes nothing