David Cameron has enlisted the New Year’s honours for his “big society” campaign, instructing that awards should prioritise those committed to serving their local communities – though officials last night conceded that today’s list contains the same proportion of local philanthropists as ever.
The list includes Kathleen White, who has worked at a Post Office in Claverley in the Black Country for 68 years and is awarded an MBE, but also Roger Carr, who receives a knighthood as chairman of Centrica, the energy firm, as well as the conglomerate which sold Cadbury to the US food giant Kraft earlier this year.
MPs have also returned to the list for the first time since the expenses scandal, with the long-serving Tory backbencher Peter Bottomley receiving a knighthood – but still playing second fiddle to his wife, the former cabinet minister Virginia Bottomley, who already has a life peerage. Labour’s Anne Begg, who uses a wheelchair because of a rare genetic condition, Gaucher’s disease, becomes a dame for her services on behalf of disabled people.
Among entertainment stars, the actor Harriet Walter becomes a dame, as does the popular historian Lady Antonia Fraser, while Sheila Hancock and David Suchet, below, become CBEs.
The fashion designer Katharine Hamnett, artist Steve McQueen and retiring head of Radio 4 Mark Damazer are similarly honoured. The singer Annie Lennox receives an OBE for her charitable work, and William Shawcross, the Queen Mother’s official biographer, becomes a commander of the Royal Victorian Order.
Among those receiving the Queen’s police medal are Detective Chief Superintendent Hamish Campbell, commander of the Metropolitan police’s homicide and serious crime directorate, who led the ill-fated investigation into the murder of Jill Dando. Also honoured is PC Ivor MacGregor, who grappled with Princess Anne’s would-be kidnapper in the Mall in 1974.
In sport, the veteran mountaineer Joe Brown becomes a CBE, while two soccer referees – Howard Webb, who refereed last summer’s World Cup final, and Terence Farley, who has spent six decades regulating matches in Durham, both receive MBEs, as does Aslie Pitter, founder of Stonewall FC, the country’s first gay football team. The former rugby player Mike Catt receives an OBE, and golfer Graeme McDowell, who won this year’s US Open and was in the victorious European Ryder Cup team, has an MBE.
Nearly 1,000 people have been listed in today’s awards, three-quarters of them described as local heroes. Nearly 45% of the list are women and 7.6% are from ethnic minorities. In total, 11% of the awards are for those working in education, 8% in health, 14% in industry and the economy, 3% in science and technology, 7% in arts and the media and 4% in sport. More than half the recipients of MBEs were nominated by the public, a practice started more than a decade ago by John Major.
An official said the prime minister had asked that a majority of awards should go to supporters of the big society, adding: “There has been a subtle change of emphasis.”