One of the greatest of honours is the CBE: Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. Three days ago, it was announced that the King, on the advice of the Honours Forfeiture Committee, had stripped Paula Vennells, the former chief executive of the Post Office, of her CBE.
The grounds given were that Vennells had ‘brought the honours system into disrepute’.
After more than a million people signed a petition calling for her to be stripped of her CBE, Vennells said last month that she would hand back her honour ‘with immediate effect’.
But it doesn’t work that way. You remain in possession of your rank until the monarch decides to remove it — at which time you are asked to send the actual medal back to Buckingham Palace.
(This may not be a fact known to the clothes designer Katharine Hamnett, who last week posted a video of herself dumping her gong in a dustbin, while declaring: ‘I’m disgusted to be British for our role in genocide in Gaza … this is my CBE, it belongs in the dustbin with Sunak and Starmer.’)
Vennells was not the only recipient to be stripped of an honour last week. A grime artist known as Wiley (born Richard Cowie) forfeited his MBE, awarded in 2017 for ‘services to music’. Wiley had made a series of odious anti-Semitic remarks on Twitter and Instagram, going back to 2020. I’m not sure why it has taken four years for the Committee to act in his case, but at least it now has.
Both these cases are unusual, in that the overwhelming majority of honours forfeitures occur when a recipient has been convicted and sentenced for a crime. The committee states that it gets involved ‘automatically’ when that happens: no public representations are required.
Entrepreneur Michelle Mone was admitted to the House of Lords as Baroness Mone of Mayfair in 2015
But here’s an odd thing. The greatest of all honours — a peerage — seems to be inviolate, no matter how heinous a crime is committed by the holder.
A former chair of the South Yorkshire Labour party, Nazir Ahmed, still glories in the title of ‘Baron Ahmed of Rotherham, in the County of South Yorkshire’, even while serving time for two counts of attempted rape of a girl and a serious sexual assault on a boy.
He has already served a stretch in prison: in 2009 he was jailed after the car he was driving was in a fatal motorway crash immediately after he had been sending text messages. Ahmed blamed his imprisonment for that on a ‘Jewish’ conspiracy.
In fact, he became the first peer to be expelled from the House of Lords, under the 2014 House of Lords Reform Act, which ensures that a peer convicted of a ‘serious’ offence (involving a prison sentence of one year or more) will cease to be member of the House.
But the title remains. The House of Lords library states: ‘The Crown does not have the power to cancel a peerage once it has been created. A peerage can only be removed by an act of parliament.’
This explains, for example, why Jeffrey Archer is still Lord Archer of Weston-Super-Mare, even though he was jailed for four years in 2001 for what the judge at his Old Bailey trial called ‘as serious an offence of perjury as I have had experience of and have been able to find in the books’.
Mr Justice Potts was referring to the way Archer had, in his successful 1987 libel action against the Daily Star (for claiming he had slept with a prostitute), perverted the course of justice by producing a falsified diary and getting a friend to provide a false alibi.
Archer, at least, no longer takes part in the deliberations of the House of Lords. However, Lord Taylor of Warwick does — and he is the vice chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on ‘Miscarriages of Justice’.
Yet this is the man who, in 2011 as a Conservative peer, was given a prison sentence for claiming over £11,000 in expenses based on a lie that he had been travelling to and from Westminster and Oxford. He had been in London the whole time, and the property in Oxford was lived in only by his nephew (who knew nothing of Taylor’s fraudulent claims at the taxpayers’ expense).
The former Post Office boss, Paula Vennells, has been stripped of her CBE
And what will become of Baroness (Michelle) Mone of Mayfair? She denies wrongdoing and has not been found guilty of anything, but when urging the Government to award contracts worth over £200 million to a firm called PPE Medpro during the Covid crisis, she assured civil servants she did not stand to gain ‘any financial benefit whatsoever … you can put this on the record’.
In reality, about £29 million of MedPro’s profits from that transaction went straight into an offshore trust set up to benefit her and her children. The National Crime Agency is now investigating.
In fact, there is a precedent for peerages to be withdrawn. I refer to the Titles Deprivation Act 1917, which cost four men their titles, including dukedoms and baronetcies, for taking part in the First World War … on the other side. Three were close relatives of our own Royal Family, via Queen Victoria’s marriage to Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.
Isn’t it long past time for a new Titles Deprivation Act?
Judge’s ‘genuine mistake’ takes us all for fools
One person with seemingly no intention of surrendering his CBE is Tan Ikram, 59, awarded that honour in 2022 for ‘services to judicial diversity’.
Last month, Ikram, on the professional networking site LinkedIn, ‘liked’ a post by a barrister called Sham Uddin which declared: ‘Free Free Palestine. To the Israeli terrorist both in the United Kingdom, the United States and of course Israel, you can run, you can bomb but you cannot hide — justice will be coming for you.’
Earlier, Uddin had posted the grotesque anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that the massacre of well over 1,000 Israeli Jews on October 7 was ‘a false flag operation’ — that is, a plot by Israel, rather than the terrorist group Hamas.
Judge Tan Ikram was awarded a CBE in 2022
The discovery of these facts caused understandable unease within judicial circles because Ikram is also the judge who decided ‘not to punish’ three women who, seven days after the massacre, took part in a protest in central London while wearing images of paragliders (which is how some Hamas terrorists crossed into Israel to carry out their slaughter).
It was after the Mail on Sunday published the pictures of this incident on its front page, under the headline ‘You Ghouls’, that the police launched a public appeal which led to the arrest of the three women — Heba Alhayek, Pauline Ankunda and Noimutu Taiwo — under the charge of ‘inviting support for a proscribed organisation’.
Judge Ikram’s decision to give them a conditional discharge, partly on the grounds that ’emotions ran very high on this issue’ was in any case odd: this was not a heat-of-the-moment action, it involved downloading images and printing them out beforehand for public display.
In light of what subsequently emerged about Ikram’s social media activity, this is nothing less than a damaging blow to public confidence in judicial impartiality.
Yet last Friday, the Crown Prosecution Service, having hastily reviewed Ikram’s behaviour in respect of the case, declared, without explanation, that it would take no action.
The only thing Ikram has said, via a statement issued by the Judicial Office, was: ‘I didn’t know that I’d liked that post. If I did, then it was a genuine mistake.’
What does that mean? That he didn’t understand the meaning of the words he had ‘liked’? Or that his finger pressed the ‘like’ icon as a result of some involuntary muscular spasm?
We are being taken for fools.
Robert Johnson is a UK-based business writer specializing in finance and entrepreneurship. With an eye for market trends and a keen interest in the corporate world, he offers readers valuable insights into business developments.
