A Grubby Display of Privilege: Tory Knighthoods in the Death Throes of a Discredited Regime

Shameless Spectacle: Tory Honours as Cheap Confetti

What a shameless spectacle we have been subjected to, as the discredited Tory rabble fling knighthoods about like cheap confetti in their death throes. It seems no overblown ego or wealthy donor is too base to be fawned over in this unseemly parade of establishment privilege.

Take Mohamed Mansour, for instance, that former minister of the Mubarak kleptocracy in Egypt who last year so generously gifted £5 million to the Tory coffers from his ample personal vault. His newly-minted ‘Sir’ title is little more than a bought indulgence, shamelessly bestowed by a Prime Minister bereft of principles beyond grubby self-preservation.

Then there are the MPs, loyal water carriers for a government that has laid waste to public services, the NHS, and the very concept of accountable governance. Philip Davies, whose wife is Esther McVey, the minister for “common sense” in a distinctly nonsensical administration, is knighted for his decades of abject service to reaction.

Last year McVey wrote in the Daily Mail that she did not “want you to see a single penny of your hard-earned cash wasted on unnecessary public spending”.

Yet this power couple have been claiming taxpayer expenses to rent a flat while letting out their own nearby home – a grubby stratagem that could have netted them up to £250,000 from the public purse.

McVey received £39,000 in taxpayers’ money to rent the flat over the last two years. She lives there with her husband, the Tory MP Philip Davies.

The Daily Telegraph, which first reported the story alongside the campaign group Led By Donkeys, said McVey and Davies had been claiming expenses on the property since 2017.

Davies owns and lets out a flat about 25 minutes’ walk away in Waterloo. In his register of interests, Davies has declared an annual income of more than £10,000 from this property.

Of course, they are not breaking any rules they are the ones that make them.

Sir Philip claims he was “somewhat flabbergasted” by the news of his honour, adding “it feels very surreal”.

That we can all agree on!

A Grubby Display of Privilege: Tory MPs Knighted for Abetting Government Misery

As is Mark Spencer, once the party’s chief forelock-tugger. Former ministers Tracey Crouch and Harriett Baldwin, stalwart enablers of policies that have immiserated millions, have been elevated to damehoods. One can only speculate as to what great deeds earned them such baubles from a Prime Minister clinging to crumbs of legitimacy.

Meanwhile, Democratic Unionist Party MP Gregory Campbell has also been made a CBE. The MP for East Londonderry is the DUP’s spokesman for international development, it must feel like Christmas…

This whole tawdry exercise reeks of the desperation of a disintegrating regime, clawing for crumbs of prestige in its last, abject days. That it has been deliberately timed for surreptitious release over Easter outrages even more, displaying Sunak’s continual contempt for public dignity.

Rather than elevating our national esteem, these demeaned titles simply highlight how far we have fallen as a society when such worthless bric-a-brac still retains purchase among the deluded classes. It is time we consign these empty feudal baubles to the rubbish heap of history where they belong, relics of an era as unfortunate as the one we now endure.

However, what is blatantly evident is this was born of arrogant entitlement. The witless indulgence of a Prime Minister who knows his days are numbered, this tawdry exercise reeks of disdain for the offices to which these people so plainly feel entitled, rather than privileged to hold. It is a pustulent carbuncle on the festering decline of a political system no longer fit for purpose.

Let’s face it they’re chucking these honours out like life jackets on a sinking ship.

Paul Knaggs