The actor Sir Mark Rylance has explained that he accepted a knighthood, overcoming reservations about the honours system, because of King Charles’s love of Shakespeare. Charles, he said, by way of reconciling the title with his disquiet about “military history”, is “one of the most sincere, devout lovers of Shakespeare I’ve ever met in my life”.
Perhaps because there really is no question about Charles’s feeling for Shakespeare, this unusually resourceful excuse – surely making its first appearance among an anti-establishment figure’s reasons for embracing its decorations – has been respectfully received.
Charles has long surpassed his own family’s historic notion of itself as spiritually related to Shakespeare. On his accession, after a lifetime’s bardolatry, he quoted Hamlet. During the 2016 commemorations of Shakespeare’s death, he went so far as to appear on stage, sharing hints on performing “to be or not to be”. Once, he delivered a lengthy Shakespeare lecture, ostensibly a humorous rebuke to unwilling teachers, actually revealing that he finds fairly worrying characters relatable. “Time and again in Shakespeare’s characters we recognise elements of ourselves,” he told fellow specialists. “Othello’s jealousy, Hamlet’s indecision, Macbeth’s ambition are all horribly familiar.” Serial murder: we’ve all been there! Maybe nobody liked to argue with him.
Mercifully, given the above, the protagonist with whom Charles has principally compared himself, since at least his Jonathan Dimbleby period, is Prince Hal, later Henry V. That is: a transformed character, no longer remotely tainted by the sale of honours, but crushed by penmanship responsibilities his subjects can never comprehend.
“We must bear all. O hard condition!” Charles/Henry V says to himself. “What infinite heart’s-ease/Must kings neglect that private men enjoy!” If it is not ideal to have a king who thinks he’s Henry V, it is probably as harmless as Mr Dick’s Charles I obsession in David Copperfield, and certainly a good thing for the Royal Shakespeare Company, of which Charles is president.
But even fans of the great Rylance must concede a major flaw in his Shakespearean honours-excuse, one if possible more serious than his views on Shakespeare authorship. Boris Johnson also loves Shakespeare. If we must wait for the scholarship contained in his delayed Shakespeare: The Riddle of Genius, testimony from an ex-lover suggests that the politician’s understanding of Shakespeare certainly rivals his mastery of the Incredible Hulk.
As lovers, Jennifer Arcuri and (then) mayor Johnson liked to recite Sonnet 29 (“When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes …”); again drawing on his sincere and devout love of the bard, they acted out Macbeth before bed. This passion for Shakespeare did not, as we know, protect the country from, among many offences, Johnson’s effective demolition of the honours system. In fact, it was during his premiership that state decorations became worthless to the point that refusing or returning one became a diminished, if still worthwhile, gesture. How is it not reflexive to reject an order that still harbours the previously sacked, subsequently exposed as abusive, Sir Gavin Williamson?
When in 2016 Rylance was favoured, Johnson, still only Thane of Uxbridge and South Ruislip, lacking even tempting mayoral sinecures, had yet to trash the entire system: it was understandable if some progressive figures felt, in accepting honours, equipped to handle any principle-based difficulties. David Cameron, later dispensing a peerage for an office manager, an OBE for his wife’s stylist and CBE for his barber, deserves recognition for initiating a selection process that can now make raffles look judicious.
Few people – after Johnson ennobled his own brother and insisted on a peerage for Evgeny Lebedev, ignoring advice from the Appointments Commission that the decision would be controversial – can be so thoroughly unfit or disreputable that they would be, if decorated, capable of bringing the current system into disrepute. Anxiety has been expressed about Liz Truss’s awards (one of several forthcoming batches): so long as she does not honour her daughters’ pets or a Russian intelligence asset, is it technically possible for her to outperform Johnson’s work?
As ever, the only person likely to rival Johnson in depravity is Johnson himself. Some confidently expect his resignation honours to feature daring new additions from the ranks of the repellent and undeserving, not necessarily restricted to journalists and his own family. Naturally he’s expected to defy, as per, ritual calls from the House of Lords not further to burden a place already so bloated and disreputable. Although some members of the public would probably have admired a Lords debate held some time after Johnson overruled the Appointments Commission’s advice not to award a peerage to Peter Cruddas (whose behaviour had been previously described in the court of appeal as “unacceptable, inappropriate and wrong”).
The Conservative peer Lord Balfe was among those proposing reforms, regretting that Johnson, “whether through contempt or disdain, [he] does not appear to take any notice of this House whatsoever”. His colleague, Labour’s Lord Griffiths, said he felt “despondent”: if nothing was done, it was “only a matter of time before this becomes an irreparable house of corruption”.
To date, however, none of the peers has been quite despondent enough to decide to quit rather than share an honour with an influx of worthless beneficiaries. The Appointments Commission has likewise chosen to endure Johnson’s snubbing and the devaluing of honours instead of resigning en masse. As for Labour, the moral high ground from which Sir Keir Starmer should be rescuing or reinventing UK decorations would be more secure if he had not invited Lord, formerly Tom Watson, the exposer of invented sex rings turned celebrity dieter, to overcome his old scruples about “the credibility of the honours system”.
All of which inaction, rather unfairly, can only make it more difficult for deserving recipients in the coming honours shipments to explain their reasons for acceptance. Titles already redolent of empire or feudal hierarchies have become further recognised as the badges of cronyism. And now they can’t even say Shakespeare made them do it.
• This article was amended on 21 February 2023. An earlier version referred to Johnson “insisting on a peerage for Evgeny Lebedev, the first premier to ignore advice from the Appointments Commission”. By way of clarification this has been changed to refer to Johnson “ignoring advice from the Appointments Commission that the decision would be controversial”.
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
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