Did No10 block a damehood for Cilla – because she backed Maggie?
JUST before she died, Cilla Black joked that if someone were to put her up for a damehood, she wouldn’t turn it down.
Well, surprise, surprise... The Mail on Sunday can reveal that the veteran entertainer had been recommended for the honour, but was rejected by Tony Blair’s Government. The reason the recommendation to include her in the New Year Honours list in 2005 was rejected remains unknown – but the decision has sparked suggestions that her support of Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party may have been a key factor.
The Blind Date host had met Thatcher in Downing Street in 1990 and said she ‘put the Great back in Great Britain’. And she appeared on stage at a Tory rally during the campaign for the 1992 Election. ‘I’m voting for John Major,’ she told the audience, ‘because he is a great Prime Minister.’
After her nomination for a damehood was rejected at the New Year honours, Ms Black was put forward for a CBE in that year’s Birthday Honours, but that was again knocked back.
Cilla’s son Robert Willis, who was also her business manager, said last night: ‘If she had been offered a damehood, she would have accepted it. That is all I can say.’
The snubs are revealed in documents headed ‘Restricted honours’ and obtained from the Cabinet Office by this newspaper under Freedom of Information laws. However, they have been censored to protect the ‘integrity of the honours system’, so do not reveal who put Ms Black’s name forward, or why she was not approved.
And although she was a supporter of the Conservatives, the entertainer was also reportedly fond of both Tony Blair and his wife Cherie, whose father Tony Booth was from her home town, Liverpool.
Cilla, who was unaware of the recommendation, recently inadvertently speculated whether a lifetime spent in light entertainment counted against her when it came to a damehood. In an interview she gave last year, she said: ‘You don’t become a dame for doing what you enjoy, as I have, but if they want to give me one I wouldn’t turn it down.’
The Cabinet Office documents include a citation in support of the nomination which described her as ‘a commanding all-round enter- tainer’. They referred to her career as a pop singer, her later TV successes and her charity work, including becoming the first high-profile patron of ovarian cancer charity WellBeing since the death of Princess Diana.
Ms Black’s close friend Christopher Biggins said: ‘I don’t know why it was blocked and if it was blocked, it was disgusting. You don’t know how these people work.’
Biggins said he was in no doubt that Black – who was awarded an OBE in 1997 – deserved the higher honours, and said it was terrible that she had not been recognised. He added: ‘What she did for the country was absolutely fantastic. She entertained us royally for nearly 50 years.’
Ms Black died of a stroke at her Spanish holiday home aged 72 on August 1.
The Cabinet Office papers also show that the late Bob Hoskins, star of The Long Good Friday and Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, was consid- ered for an OBE on four occasions between 1987 and 1989 but was never given the honour. His name was put forward by Bill Cotton, the former head of Light Entertainment at the BBC, but the files do not explain why the award was not made.
Dennis Potter, the playwright who gave Hoskins his break in Pennies From Heaven, was also considered for either a CBE or an OBE in 1978. But an official wrote ‘removed by the P.M.’ next to his entry on the files.
At the time, controversy was still fresh over his 1976 play Brimstone And Treacle, about a sexual relationship between the Devil and a seriously disabled young woman.
The writer, who died in 1994, has previously been reported as having turned down an honour.
The Cabinet Office, Mr Blair and Dame Sue Street, who was Permanent Secretary at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport at the time of Ms Black’s recommendation, all declined to comment.