Knighthood for Nigel would devalue them

ALL right, I admit it; I’m in my seventies and I’m a grumpy old man. Quite a lot of things make me grumpy. I get grumpy about blokes who don’t wash their hands when they’ve been to the loo; would you shake someone else’s hand and not wash your hands afterwards? What’s so special about yours?

I am mildly irritated by media announcers and commentators who get their singles and plurals wrong – phenomenon/phenomena, bacterium/bacteria, criterion/ criteria etc. – as well as things like ‘fewer’ and ‘less’. They should know better. I get annoyed about dogwalkers who leave dog poo lying around, or who hang full poo bags in the hedge – do they think the fairies are going to collect them up? – but what really gets my goat is being lied to by politicians.

OK, I know people will say that all politicians tell lies – Geoffrey Cox apparently told a hustings meeting that it was naive to expect politicians not to lie, and I’m pretty sure this wasn’t why he got the sack – but when people say that Nigel Farage – that most mendacious of EU mythmakers – should get a knighthood, that’s when I really start to grind my teeth. Admittedly, no one would expect me, an ardent Europhile, to be any kind of Farage fan, but we give knighthoods to people who have served their country well or who have achieved something that benefits the nation as a whole, don’t we? Not someone who has lied and cheated their way to a narrow victory that splits the country right down the middle.

It will probably take a decade or so before we know whether or not Brexit turns out to be the best thing ever for the country, both politically and economically, as those archBrexiteers like Mr Farage have been promising, but even if it does, do we really want to honour someone so unscrupulous and corrosively divisive, just because he made a lot of Brexiteers dance with glee at 11pm on January 31 singing

Land of Hope and Glory (with the main emphasis on hope, if they’re honest)? I don’t think so, and I would guess that there are a lot of Leave voters who would agree with me, let alone Europhiles like myself. Because we don’t give knighthoods to people like Nigel Farage, do we? Francis Kirkham,

Mid-Devon