Alexander Chancellor

Long Life

When the man from the Cabinet Office telephoned, he was anxious to find out why I hadn’t replied to a letter asking if I would find it ‘agreeable’ to be appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. I told him I hadn’t got the letter, which he said had been posted to me c/o Guardian for which I used to write a column. (The letter, in an envelope labelled ‘On Her Majesty’s Service’, ‘urgent’, ‘strictly private’, and stuff like that, was eventually forwarded to me, but a month after it had been sent, already opened and resealed with Sellotape.) 

In response to my puzzlement, the civil servant said, ‘This is not a hoax.’ It had not, in fact, occurred to me that it might be, but he explained that many people offered honours nowadays believed they were being the victims of a hoax. He asked if I would accept mine. I said I would. Then he asked if I would be happy for the citation to say that it was ‘for services to journalism’. I’m not quite sure how one can ‘serve’ journalism, or even if it is something one should aspire to, given journalism’s current reputation; but since I could think of no other conceivable reason for being given a CBE, I said yes to that, too. So in due course my name appeared in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List — together with that of Kate Winslet and countless others — as a new recruit to the Order of the British Empire.

The Order was founded in 1917 by King George V to extend the reach of the honours system to include a wider range of people than civil servants, diplomats, and others in the service of the Crown.

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