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Honours System (Reform)

It is a great pleasure to be able to introduce to the House a report of the Public Administration Committee on the honours system. It is always customary to say that reports are timely, but in this case the report is particularly so. However, in a sense it would always have been timely. I shall quote from a report:"““There is no doubt that there have been for some time, and recently in increasing numbers, persons who, for want of a better name, we may stigmatise as touts, who have been going about asserting that they were in a position to secure honours in return for specified payments””." That is from the report of the royal commission on honours in 1922. Honours matter. They are important. I shall quote only once from our report, at the beginning of which we stated:"““We take the honours system seriously, as a way in which the state seeks to recognise service and achievement that it values. This is an important function, which is why it deserves proper attention.””" We continued:"““In particular, we consider that honours are not mere decorations; they are important symbols of what is valued in national life.””" Last week I visited a youth club in my constituency in an area called Hednesford, which is an old mining area. Just behind the Florence street Methodist church is a building that is no more than a wooden shack, in which a 70-year-old ex-miner twice a week runs an over-subscribed youth club. He is also, by the way, the caretaker at the local school, where he acts as a general counsellor to the students. It would never occur to that man that he might be thought of for any kind of honour. It is work that he does because he thinks he should, because his God has asked him to and his civic consciousness drives him to it. I cite that example only because I came away from there thinking, ““If ever a man needed an honour, it was that man.”” That is why the honours system matters. It is a way for us to say, ““This is the kind of activity that our society values””. That is what the honours system should do. If we cause that system to be contaminated by things that should not contaminate it, we of course devalue the system across the board, for people including the man I have described, who deserve honour. That is what happens. A confusion has always existed between honour as something that we should like to value as a society and honour as a lubricant of patronage—usually patronage associated with money. Those two ingredients have always characterised the honours system and caused difficulties. As the first of my quotations suggests, there is nothing new about that. In case any hon. Member is minded this afternoon to try to make political points by describing the problem as a phenomenon of a particular period or Government, the merest glance at history is enough to sweep such attempts away. Our old friend Maundy Gregory, the only man to be convicted under the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925, was only one of the touts who engaged in the trade in the first part of that century. It was said that Maundy Gregory would sell a viscountcy for £80,000 to £120,000 and a barony for £30,000 to £50,000, and that a baronetcy would cost from £25,000 and a knighthood £10,000 to £15,000. Lloyd George is estimated to have amassed more than £1.5 million in his private bank account from the sale of honours—that is about £150 million at today's prices. Between 1916 and 1922, 120 hereditary peerages were created, and more than 1,500 knighthoods were awarded. It has been suggested that Gregory was paid £30,000 a year for his role as an honours broker. He continued to sell honours after Lloyd George's resignation in 1922 and after the 1925 Act was passed, splitting his spoils with a corrupt Conservative official, Sir Leigh Maclachlan, and Sir Ronald Waterhouse, Stanley Baldwin's private secretary, through whom he was able to get names on the honours list. He was caught after approaching Edward Billyard-Leake, a retired naval lieutenant-commander, and offering him a price of £10,000 for a knighthood. Billyard-Leake reported him to the police and Gregory was charged under the Act. He was fined £50 and jailed for six months—of which he served two—in 1933. After serving his brief sentence in Wormwood Scrubs he was collected by a car from Conservative central office before he could be rearrested on a murder charge, and was whisked off to a life of exile in France on an alleged £30,000 payment authorised by Baldwin; he died there in a prison camp during the Nazi occupation. I put that on the record only so that we may remember where we have come from; and so that, when some people suggest that there has been a great falling-off in standards in public life, we can compare standards in public life at the beginning of the 21st century to the things that were taking place at the beginning of the 20th century.