“Honours dishonour,” Gustave Flaubert once wrote, confronted with the fabulously pompous, corrupt and incompetent regime of the 19th-century Second French Empire. That succinct formulation may find an echo in our present, knee-deep as we are in newly minted lords, baronesses and knights, elevated mostly for their services to the Conservative Party.
What is a democrat to do with such titles? Tempting though it may be to wish them away (if I remember correctly, the Morning Star published a curt notice of the marriage of Charles Windsor and Diana Spencer), this is to deny them their undoubted power. It would be better, perhaps, to acknowledge their existence and their artificiality at once, to say ‘Baron’ Cruddas, ‘Lord’ Offord of Garvel or ‘Dame’ Andrea Leadsom.
For the artifice extends back from noble twig and aristocratic branch through royal bole and root. A display of photographs of the royal family now on show at their Kensington Palace in London gives a partial but telling view of the royals’ persistent visual allure.
