DOMINIC LAWSON: The former Post Office boss has lost her CBE, but a perjurer, a fraudster and a sex criminal are still Lords. Isn’t it time we stripped them 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 former chief govt of the Post Office, of her CBE.

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

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

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

(This is probably not a reality identified 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 position 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 grime artist referred to as Wiley (born Richard Cowie) forfeited his MBE, awarded in 2017 for ‘companies to music’. Wiley had made a collection 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, but a minimum of 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 best of all honours — a peerage — appears to be inviolate, irrespective of how heinous a crime is dedicated by the holder.

A former chair of the South Yorkshire Labour social gathering, Nazir Ahmed, still 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 served 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 grew to become the primary peer to be expelled from the House of Lords, beneath the 2014 House of Lords Reform Act, which ensures that a peer convicted of a ‘critical’ offence (involving a jail sentence of one 12 months 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 facility 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 is still 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 known 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 in opposition to the Daily Star (for claiming he had slept with a prostitute), perverted the course of justice by producing a falsified diary and getting a buddy to supply a false alibi.

Archer, a minimum of, now 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 develop into of Baroness (Michelle) Mone of Mayfair? She denies wrongdoing and has not been discovered responsible of something, but when urging the Government to award contracts price over £200 million to a agency known as PPE Medpro in the course of the Covid disaster, she assured civil servants she didn’t stand to realize ‘any monetary profit by any means … you’ll be able to put this on the document’.

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

In reality, there may be a precedent for peerages to be withdrawn. I check with the Titles Deprivation Act 1917, which price 4 males their titles, together with dukedoms and baronetcies, for participating within the First World War … on the opposite facet. Three had 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 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 variety’.

Last month, Ikram, on the skilled networking web site LinkedIn, ‘favored’ a put up by a barrister known as Sham Uddin which declared: ‘Free Free Palestine. To the Israeli terrorist each within the United Kingdom, the United States and of course Israel, you’ll be able to run, you’ll be able to bomb but you can’t disguise — justice will probably be coming for you.’

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

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

It was after the Mail on Sunday revealed the photographs of this incident on its entrance web page, beneath the headline ‘You Ghouls’, that the police launched a public enchantment which led to the arrest of the three girls — Heba Alhayek, Pauline Ankunda and Noimutu Taiwo — beneath the cost of ‘inviting help for a proscribed organisation’.

Judge Ikram’s determination to offer 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 damaging 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 would take no motion.

The solely factor Ikram has stated, by way of a assertion 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 that means of the phrases he had ‘favored’? Or that his finger pressed the ‘like’ icon as a end result of some involuntary muscular spasm?

We are being taken for fools.