CBE: Cronies of British Empire

Fury as gongs go to party donors and bureaucrats

THE New Year honours list was plunged into controversy last night with a string of contentious awards.

Jacqueline Gold, boss of high street sex shop Ann Summers and daughter of porn baron David Gold, was made a CBE.

Lin Homer, who presided over failures in the immigration system and runs the shambolic UK tax office, was awarded a damehood.

Joining them on the list were a string of scandal-hit bureaucrats, political cronies and donors.

Miss Homer was the £200,000-a-year boss of the immigration system branded ‘not fit for purpose’ by then Home Secretary John Reid in 2006. On her watch it emerged 1,000 foreign criminals had been mistakenly released and some 450,000 asylum case files dumped in boxes at the Home Office. Honours were also given to:

An ex-Environment Agency boss who claimed its Somerset flood defences were ‘a success story’, a senior official accused of bungling a benefits IT project and the head of customer services at the Passport Office, which suffered a major applications backlog last year;

David Cameron’s former election guru, Australian Lynton Crosby, who was awarded a knighthood, and half a dozen Tory Party officials;

Former climate change secretary Ed Davey, who lost his seat in May, was awarded a knighthood;

Multimillionaire Zameer Choudrey, boss of Bestway cash-and-carry which donated nearly half a million pounds to the Tory Party, who becomes a CBE.

Miss Homer became chief executive of the UK Border Agency, which was the subject of highly critical reports by MPs and was later scrapped. After nearly £1million over four years in pay and bonuses, Miss Homer moved to the Department for Transport and then to HMRC. Her appointment led to concerns among MPs that officials were ‘rewarding failure’.

Since then, the tax office has been rocked by scandals over millions of miscalculated tax bills and its failure to answer up to half of all calls made to its hotline.

Miss Gold is best known for the Rampant Rabbit sex toy.

As anticipated following leaks in recent days, actress Barbara Windsor was made a dame and jockey AP McCoy was awarded a knighthood. Actress Imelda Staunton, 59, upgrades from an OBE to a CBE, actor Idris Elba is made an OBE, and actress Sian Phillips, 82, becomes a dame.

Veteran broadcaster Martyn Lewis, 70, will receive a knighthood for his charity work. Damon Albarn, 47, the former frontman of indie band Blur, is made an OBE.

Yesterday, the head of the honours committee, Sir Jonathan Stephens, claimed civil servants only got an honour if they went ‘above and beyond the call of duty’ in their work. But among those recognised are officials working in chaotic departments or quangos and those associated with failing projects.

Another mandarin on the honours list is Robert Devereux, the former permanent secretary at the Department for Work and Pensions, who is awarded a knighthood.

Two years ago he was savaged by the then chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, Margaret Hodge, over failures in the IT system for Universal Credit.

David Jordan, former Environment Agency operations director, was made an OBE for services to the environment and international environmental protection. He provoked a backlash when he defended the agency’s handling of the 2014 floods which left much of the Somerset Levels under water.

Alan Frame, head of customer management at HM Passport Office, is made an OBE for ‘services to public administration’. Last summer the office came under fire over a backlog of 550,000 applications, which forced families to cancel summer breaks.

Sir Jonathan said: ‘There are no automatic honours, you don’t get an honour for doing your job. You’ve got to do it above and beyond the call of duty.’