A system still rife with abuse

IN UNEARTHING the so-called Lavender List, The Mail on Sunday has performed a valuable service to history. It has long been the missing link connecting two periods of abuse of the honours system between the 1920s and the present day.

In the early 1920s, theatrical producer and political fixer Maundy Gregory sold honours in return for contributions to the Lloyd George Fund, to help the election campaigns of Prime Minister David Lloyd George. When people such as South African war profiteer Sir Joseph Robinson tried to buy a peerage for £30,000, there was a revolt in Parliament, and the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act was passed in 1925, under which Gregory was prosecuted and jailed in 1933.

The haphazard approach that Lady Falkender describes Harold Wilson taking towards the honours system, with names being kept on slips of paper, seems a good metaphor for his Government, which seemed to slip from crisis to crisis in the mid-1970s.

Although it seems arcane, it is actually important whether the highly controversial 1976 Honours List was originally written on lavender-coloured paper – that is, Lady Falkender’s private stationery – or the lilac paper of Downing Street. The document suggests it was the lilac stationery, supporting her suggestion that others besides her need to take responsibility for the debacle.

The slippage from Wilson’s ‘kitchen Cabinet’ government of the 1970s to Tony Blair’s ‘sofa government’ of the 1990s was merely a change of domestic euphemism. For behind the polished carapace of the Blair ministries was a system of honours that also rewarded political donations, though in a more efficient way than one that might attract the attentions of the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act. Nothing was written on paper but people were undoubtedly awarded honours more for their contributions to New Labour than to society in general.

Nor was Labour the only party to indulge in this way; the Lib Dems and Tories have been caught out occasionally, though not on the same scale. We are about to mark the centenary of Maundy Gregory’s crimes, but in a sense he is alive and well.