Poltics
One of the greatest of honours is the CBE: Commander of the Most Magnificent Narrate 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 govt of the Publish Office, of her CBE.
The grounds given were that Vennells had ‘introduced the honours system into disrepute’.
After more than a million folks 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 carry out’.
But it doesn’t work that way. You remain in possession of your rank unless the monarch removes it — at which time you are asked to ship the actual medal back to Buckingham Palace.
(This may no longer be a fact known to the dresses fashion 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 feature in genocide in Gaza… here is my CBE, it belongs within the dustbin with Sunak and Starmer.’)
Entrepreneur Michelle Mone was admitted to the Home of Lords as Baroness Mone of Mayfair in 2015
Vennells was no longer the fitting recipient to be stripped of an honour last week. A rapper known as Wiley (born Richard Cowie) forfeited his MBE, awarded in 2017 for ‘products and services to tune’. Wiley had made a series of odious anti-Semitic remarks on Twitter and Instagram, going back to 2020. I’m no longer obvious why it has taken four years for the Committee to act in his case, but at least it now has.
Each these cases are unusual, in that the overwhelming majority of honours forfeitures happen when a recipient has been convicted and sentenced for a crime. The committee states that it gets enthusiastic ‘automatically’ when that happens: no public representations are required.
But here’s an unusual factor. The greatest of all honours — a peerage — appears to be like to be inviolate, no matter how snide a crime is committed by the holder.
A former chair of the South Yorkshire Labour party, Nazir Ahmed, still glories within the title of ‘Baron Ahmed of Rotherham, within the County of South Yorkshire’, even while serving time for 2 counts of attempted rape of a lady and a critical sexual assault on a boy.
He has already done a stretch in reformatory: in 2009 he was jailed after the car he was riding was in a fatal motorway crash immediately after he had been sending textual screech material messages. Ahmed blamed his imprisonment for that on a ‘Jewish’ conspiracy.
In fact, he became the primary sight to be expelled from the Home of Lords, below the 2014 Home of Lords Reform Act, which ensures that a sight convicted of a ‘critical’ offence (inviting a reformatory sentence of one year or more) will cease to be member of the Home.
But the title remains. The Home of Lords library states: ‘The Crown does no longer have the power to cancel a peerage once it has been created. A peerage can greatest be removed by an act of parliament.’
Lord Taylor of Warwick was given a reformatory sentence in 2011 for fraudulent charges claims
This explains, for example, why Jeffrey Archer is still Lord Archer of Weston-Large-Mare, even supposing he was jailed for four years in 2001 for what the resolve at his Stale Bailey trial called ‘as critical an offence of perjury as I have had expertise of and have been able to glean within the books’.
Mr Justice Potts was referring to the way Archer had, in his a hit 1987 libel action against the Daily Star (for claiming he had slept with a prostitute), perverted the route of justice by producing a falsified diary and getting a friend to give a false alibi.
Archer, at least, no longer takes part within the deliberations of the Home 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 here is the man who, in 2011 as a Conservative sight, was given a reformatory sentence for claiming over £11,000 in charges based on a lie that he had been travelling to and from Westminster and Oxford. He had been in London the total time, and the property in Oxford was lived in greatest by his nephew (who knew nothing of Taylor’s fraudulent claims at the taxpayers’ expense).
The former Publish Office boss, Paula Vennells, has been stripped of her CBE
And what will change into of Baroness (Michelle) Mone of Mayfair? She denies wrongdoing and has no longer been learned responsible of anything, but when urging the Government to award contracts rate over £200 million to a agency called PPE Medpro all thru the Covid disaster, she assured civil servants she did no longer stand to gain ‘any financial benefit whatsoever … you can set aside this on the file’.
In reality, about £29 million of MedPro’s profits from that transaction went straight into an offshore belief status as a lot as benefit her and her adolescents. The National Crime Agency is now investigating.
In fact, there is a precedent for peerages to be withdrawn. I seek advice from the Titles Deprivation Act 1917, which payment four males their titles, together with dukedoms and baronetcies, for taking part within the First World War … on the other aspect. Three were end relatives of our gain Royal Family, via Queen Victoria’s marriage to Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.
Is never always it long past time for a unique Titles Deprivation Act?
Poltics Resolve’s ‘valid mistake’ takes us all for fools
One person with reputedly no procedure of surrendering his CBE is Tan Ikram, 59, awarded that honour in 2022 for ‘products and services to judicial diversity’.
Last month, Ikram, on the professional networking site LinkedIn, ‘loved’ a put up by a barrister called Sham Uddin which declared: ‘Free Free Palestine. To the Israeli terrorist each within the United Kingdom, the United States and of route Israel, you can accelerate, you can bomb but you cannot veil — justice will be coming for you.’
Earlier, Uddin had posted the grotesque anti-Semitic conspiracy idea that the massacre of well over 1,000 Israeli Jews on October 7 was ‘a false flag operation’ — that is, a dwelling by Israel, rather than the terrorist crew Hamas.
Resolve Tan Ikram was awarded a CBE in 2022
The invention of these facts caused understandable unease within judicial circles because Ikram is also the resolve who decided ‘no longer to punish’ three females who, seven days after the massacre, took part in a exclaim 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 images of this incident on its front page, below the headline ‘You Ghouls’, that the police launched a public appeal which resulted in the arrest of the three females — Heba Alhayek, Pauline Ankunda and Noimutu Taiwo — below the charge of ‘inviting make stronger for a proscribed organisation’.
Resolve Ikram’s determination to offer them a conditional discharge, partly on the grounds that ‘feelings ran very high on this challenge’ was in any case unusual: this was no longer a heat-of-the-moment action, it enthusiastic downloading images and printing them out beforehand for public display.
In light of what therefore emerged about Ikram’s social media activity, here is nothing much less than a damaging blow to public self assurance 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 correct factor Ikram has said, via a statement issued by the Judicial Office, was: ‘I did no longer know that I would loved that put up. If I did, then it was a valid mistake.’
What does that mean? That he did no longer understand the meaning of the phrases he had ‘loved’? Or that his finger pressed the ‘admire’ icon as a consequence of some involuntary muscular spasm?
We are being taken for fools.