Why Gary Barlow should hang on to his OBE

‘Strip him of his knighthood!’ Or life peerage, or CBE, OBE — or whatever. The cry goes up with a kind of automaticity these days, and with increasing shrillness. As I write, elements in Fleet Street are hyperventilating about Gary Barlow’s OBE. Barlow and two other members of the band Take That are reported to have avoided paying tens of millions of pounds in tax by investing in the Icebreaker Management scheme, deemed by HMRC to be a vehicle for tax avoidance.

Note ‘avoidance’. Steer clear of the word ‘evasion’ because there has been no suggestion of criminality: Mr Barlow and others in his band are threatened only with a hefty bill for unpaid tax.

And a fat lot it will do my own media profile to defend him. Every era has its pet villainies and our own appears to have selected as the moral horrors de nos jours, bankers’ bonuses, tax-dodging and sexual touching. Eighty years ago it would have been homosexuality, treason, too short a skirt, and divorce. Outrage shifts its focus, and the Guardian columnist Zoe Williams was not the first, nor will she be the last, to call for Barlow to do the decent thing and hand back his OBE.

She took care in a radio debate with me this week to allow that she didn’t personally think honours were worth having anyway; but she wants people who do think they’re worth having not to have them if they avoid tax. I do slightly wonder whether Barlow’s most heinous offence in Guardian eyes has actually been to support the Conservative party; and there is indignation among the paper’s readers that David Cameron, while condemning tax avoidance, has not endorsed the call for the singer to renounce the trinket they don’t think it worth accepting in the first place.