DOMINIC LAWSON: It’s time we stripped sure Lords of their titles

One of the best of honours is the CBE: Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. Three days in the past, it was introduced that the King, on the recommendation of the Honours Forfeiture Committee, had stripped Paula Vennells, the previous chief govt of the Post Office, of her CBE.

The grounds given have been that Vennells had ‘introduced the honours system into disrepute’.

After greater than one million folks signed a petition calling for her to be stripped of her CBE, Vennells mentioned final month that she would hand again her honour ‘with speedy impact’.

But it does not work that manner. You stay in possession of your rank till the monarch decides to take away it — at which era you might be requested to ship the precise medal again to Buckingham Palace.

(This might not be a reality recognized to the garments designer Katharine Hamnett, who final week posted a video of herself dumping her gong in a dustbin, whereas declaring: ‘I’m disgusted to be British for our function in genocide in Gaza … that is my CBE, it belongs within the dustbin with Sunak and Starmer.’)

Vennells was not the one recipient to be stripped of an honour final week. A rapper generally known as Wiley (born Richard Cowie) forfeited his MBE, awarded in 2017 for ‘companies to music‘. Wiley had made a sequence of odious anti-Semitic remarks on Twitter and Instagram, going again to 2020. I’m undecided why it has taken 4 years for the Committee to behave in his case, however at the very least it now has.

Both these circumstances are uncommon, in that the overwhelming majority of honours forfeitures happen when a recipient has been convicted and sentenced for a crime. The committee states that it will get concerned ‘routinely’ when that occurs: no public representations are required.

But this is an odd factor. The biggest of all honours — a peerage — appears to be inviolate, irrespective of how heinous a criminal offense is dedicated by the holder.

A former chair of the South Yorkshire Labour occasion, Nazir Ahmed, nonetheless glories within the title of ‘Baron Ahmed of Rotherham, within the County of South Yorkshire’, even whereas serving time for 2 counts of tried rape of a woman and a critical sexual assault on a boy.

He has already executed a stretch in jail: in 2009 he was jailed after the automotive he was driving was in a deadly motorway crash instantly after he had been sending textual content messages. Ahmed blamed his imprisonment for that on a ‘Jewish’ conspiracy.

In reality, he turned the primary peer to be expelled from the House of Lords, below the 2014 House of Lords Reform Act, which ensures {that a} peer convicted of a ‘critical’ offence (involving a jail sentence of 1 yr or extra) will stop to be member of the House.

But the title stays. The House of Lords library states: ‘The Crown doesn’t have the ability to cancel a peerage as soon as it has been created. A peerage can solely be eliminated by an act of parliament.’

This explains, for instance, why Jeffrey Archer remains to be Lord Archer of Weston-Super-Mare, regardless that he was jailed for 4 years in 2001 for what the choose at his Old Bailey trial referred to as ‘as critical an offence of perjury as I’ve had expertise of and have been capable of finding within the books’.

Mr Justice Potts was referring to the best way Archer had, in his profitable 1987 libel motion towards the Daily Star (for claiming he had slept with a prostitute), perverted the course of justice by producing a falsified diary and getting a good friend to supply a false alibi.

Archer, at the very least, not takes half within the deliberations of the House of Lords. However, Lord Taylor of Warwick does — and he’s the vice chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on ‘Miscarriages of Justice’.

Yet that is the person who, in 2011 as a Conservative peer, was given a jail sentence for claiming over £11,000 in bills primarily based on a lie that he had been travelling to and from Westminster and Oxford. He had been in London the entire time, and the property in Oxford was lived in solely by his nephew (who knew nothing of Taylor’s fraudulent claims on the taxpayers’ expense).

And what’s going to turn into of Baroness (Michelle) Mone of Mayfair? She denies wrongdoing and has not been discovered responsible of something, however when urging the Government to award contracts value over £200 million to a agency referred to as PPE Medpro in the course of the Covid disaster, she assured civil servants she didn’t stand to realize ‘any monetary profit in anyway … you possibly can put this on the report’.

In actuality, about £29 million of MedPro’s income from that transaction went straight into an offshore belief set as much as profit her and her youngsters. The National Crime Agency is now investigating.

In reality, there’s a precedent for peerages to be withdrawn. I discuss with the Titles Deprivation Act 1917, which value 4 males their titles, together with dukedoms and baronetcies, for participating within the First World War … on the opposite facet. Three have been shut family members of our personal Royal Family, by way of Queen Victoria’s marriage to Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.

Isn’t it long gone time for a brand new Titles Deprivation Act?

Judge’s ‘real mistake’ takes us all for fools 

One individual with seemingly no intention of surrendering his CBE is Tan Ikram, 59, awarded that honour in 2022 for ‘companies to judicial range’.

Last month, Ikram, on the skilled networking website LinkedIn, ‘favored’ a put up by a barrister referred to as Sham Uddin which declared: ‘Free Free Palestine. To the Israeli terrorist each within the United Kingdom, the United States and naturally Israel, you possibly can run, you possibly can bomb however you can’t conceal — justice can be coming for you.’

Earlier, Uddin had posted the grotesque anti-Semitic conspiracy principle that the bloodbath of nicely over 1,000 Israeli Jews on October 7 was ‘a false flag operation’ — that’s, a plot by Israel, relatively than the terrorist group Hamas.

The discovery of those details prompted comprehensible unease inside judicial circles as a result of Ikram can be the choose who determined ‘to not punish’ three ladies who, seven days after the bloodbath, took half in a protest in central London whereas sporting photographs of paragliders (which is how some Hamas terrorists crossed into Israel to hold out their slaughter).

It was after the Mail on Sunday printed the images of this incident on its entrance web page, below the headline ‘You Ghouls’, that the police launched a public attraction which led to the arrest of the three ladies — Heba Alhayek, Pauline Ankunda and Noimutu Taiwo — below the cost of ‘inviting assist for a proscribed organisation’.

Judge Ikram’s determination to present them a conditional discharge, partly on the grounds that ‘feelings ran very excessive on this difficulty’ was in any case odd: this was not a heat-of-the-moment motion, it concerned downloading photographs and printing them out beforehand for public show.

In mild of what subsequently emerged about Ikram’s social media exercise, that is nothing lower than a harmful blow to public confidence in judicial impartiality.

Yet final Friday, the Crown Prosecution Service, having unexpectedly reviewed Ikram’s behaviour in respect of the case, declared, with out clarification, that it will take no motion.

The solely factor Ikram has mentioned, by way of an announcement issued by the Judicial Office, was: ‘I did not know that I’d favored that put up. If I did, then it was a real mistake.’

What does that imply? That he did not perceive the which means of the phrases he had ‘favored’? Or that his finger pressed the ‘like’ icon on account of some involuntary muscular spasm?

We are being taken for fools.