The ex-Post Office boss has lost her CBE, but a perjurer, a fraudster and a sex criminal are still Lords. Isn’t it time we removed THEIR titles?

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 Paula 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’.

It doesn’t work that way, though. You remain in possession of your rank until the monarch removes 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.’)

Odious

Vennells was not the only recipient to be stripped of an honour last week. A rapper 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. 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 done 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.

This is the man who, in 2011, as a Conservative peer, was given a prison sentence for claiming £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).

Precedent

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 more than £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 World War I . . . 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?