Something that always bothers liberal Britons is that Americans might believe a TV series such as Downton Abbey is a semi-documentary, and that the United Kingdom is still a class-ridden society in thrall to ideas of inherited rank and social position. Because liberal Britons know this is unfair and untrue. Or rather, it is unfair and untrue with one extraordinary exception: the British honors system, the customary practice of awarding medals and titles to citizens.

This exception of ancient privilege has helped create a summer of misery for the British government and its newish prime minister, Rishi Sunak. It is a saga both funny and slightly shaming.

Almost all countries have honors systems—public virtue is rarely its own reward. Every year, some 2,000 Britons are recipients of one level of honor or another (Italy and France dish out more). Like several of our invented traditions, the British honors system stretches back only as far as the early years of the 20th century. During this tumultuous period—when organized labor was on the march, the Irish wanted Home Rule, and suffragettes were breaking windows—the ruling class was necessarily at its most resourceful in finding ways of cementing the people to the state.

Accordingly, the Order of the British Empire was established in 1917, as a way of decorating the king’s subjects for noncombat services during the Great War. Imperial associations aside, the award is quite harmless. All of those honored have the excitement of going to a royal palace to receive their medal from the monarch or a member of the Royal Family. They then have the cachet of using the title in their formal address; tables in otherwise booked-out restaurants are suddenly found for lords and knights. Photographs of the awardee meeting royalty appear on study walls—and everyone thus blessed gets to have a story about how the late Queen smiled at them or how Charles laughed at their jokes. Notoriously, rebellious actors become royalists overnight.  

[From the August 1863 issue: An American in the House of Lords]

This part of the honors system is surprisingly democratic—or at least no less benign than belonging to a Rotary Club, say. Anyone can nominate someone, even themselves. The nominations are collected, sifted into categories, and whittled down by civil servants into short lists that are presented to committees of the great and good from relevant areas of public life: science and technology, culture and the arts, the charity sector, and so on. The vetting is no doubt thorough and in good faith, but this being Britain, a degree of possibly envious cynicism is sometimes heard—about an Order of the British Empire, or OBE, being awarded for Other Buggers’ Efforts.

I recently met a woman member of the House of Lords who was emailed out of the blue by someone applying for an honor; they asked if she might provide a reference. “But I’ve never heard of you,” she objected. “Oh, that’s all right,” the emailer replied. “I’ll take you to lunch, and we can get to know each other.”

The OBEs are not the side of the honors system that’s been causing trouble. Nor even are the more prestigious knighthoods. To be knighted might not strike one as a natural way for a democracy to demonstrate its socially inclusive, multicultural values, but in the past couple of years, two of my friends have been knighted: One is Black, and the other is gay. Both naturally professed a slight embarrassment, but this was offset by the pleasure their elderly relatives supposedly took in the award.

The problem lies in the peerages. To be “ennobled” and become a member of the House of Lords is simultaneously to be honored and to be appointed to the legislature of the United Kingdom. A lord or lady not only gets the best restaurant reservations, but also sits in the Palace of Westminster and holds a significant degree of political sway, the House of Lords being the deliberative second chamber to the elected House of Commons. Much as the House of Representatives and the Senate form the U.S. Congress, the U.K.’s two chambers form Parliament—with the important difference that, unlike the Lords, the U.S. Senate is an elected body. Although the initiative in lawmaking belongs to the Commons, the Lords nevertheless wields influence by debating, revising, and ratifying legislative proposals.

Once elevated to the leather-upholstered benches of the Lords chamber, you can join the 90 or so hereditary peers (dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts) left over from an uncompleted reform during the Tony Blair years, and the two dozen bishops of the Church of England, including the archbishop of Canterbury. Hereditary peerages are rarely created; nearly 40 years have passed since the previous three. But peers for life (their title nonheritable) are made all the time—and whoever gets to nominate people for the House of Lords thus exercises considerable powers of patronage. Peers, like the members of the U.S. Supreme Court, sit for life.

Lord-making usually happens twice a year, in a New Year’s honors list and in the monarch’s birthday honors list. In practice, the prime minister of the day comes up with a collection of people he or she wants ennobled, including, by convention, some nominees from the opposition parties and a few others put forward by the civil service. These nominees are then checked for wholesomeness by an independent committee.

[Read: A tale of two legislative chambers]

In addition, however, is another list that follows the calling of a general election: the so-called dissolution list, which features politicians who are retiring from the House of Commons and might have some residual usefulness. Finally, and most poisonously, there is the list granted to an outgoing prime minister. This one is hard to describe as anything other than a way of rewarding old comrades and close cronies.

Enter—or rather, exit—Boris Johnson. Even before he quit as prime minister last summer, Johnson created characteristic mayhem by using honors lists to elevate obviously unsuitable people to the Lords. In 2020, against the advice of the MI5 security service, he controversially raised to the peerage Evgeny Lebedev, the newspaper-owning son of a Russian oligarch and former KGB officer. Some critics suspected that Lebedev’s support for Johnson while the latter was London mayor, as well as his hospitality during Johnson’s reported visits to Lebedev’s luxurious Umbrian pile, were factors in the decision.

Not all departing prime ministers submit an honors list. Blair didn’t; nor did Gordon Brown. Johnson, however, put forward the names of at least 16 people to become peers. Some were young, underqualified former aides; a number had been implicated in the “Partygate” scandals during the pandemic lockdown, the issue most responsible for the public’s loss of confidence in Johnson; and four of them were sitting Conservative MPs, loyal to Johnson.

The immediate problem with the last category, aside from the appearance of cronyism, was a straightforwardly political one: To take up their peerages, these parliamentarians would have to resign their Commons seats, triggering special elections that Sunak’s government, dealing with the mess left by Johnson and his successor, Liz Truss, might easily lose.

One of these MPs was Nadine Dorries. A combative Liverpudlian from a working-class family, Dorries is an unusual Tory. Well to the right of the party mainstream, Dorries was passed over for government office for 14 years after her first election, in 2005. Only in 2019 was she given a brief as a junior health minister—by Johnson, whom she had supported for the party leadership that year. Before, she was best known for her participation in a reality TV show set in an Australian jungle, where she was obliged to eat a camel’s toe and an ostrich’s anus. She succeeded in parlaying that celebrity into a series of potboiler novels set in 1950s Liverpool. By the time of Johnson’s fall, Dorries had gained cabinet rank as culture minister.

[Read: Boris Johnson meets his destiny]

When, last July, Johnson’s senior cabinet colleagues—Sunak included—were abandoning their leader by resigning and making his position untenable, Dorries stood firm. To some, her defense of her boss spoke of an almost romantic devotion, but he alone in his party had recognized her abilities and rewarded them, where his snobbish predecessors had not.

So Johnson nominated Dorries for a peerage. But when the final list was published, her name was not on it. “I was born into poverty and clawed my way out of it … and then carved out a role in public service,” a deeply disappointed Dorries wrote in the Daily Mail. “A seat in the Lords was recognition of that.” Instead, she went on, “sinister forces conspired against me and have left me heartbroken.”

Dorries did not name her presumed persecutors, but control over an outgoing prime minister’s honors list ultimately lies with the new incumbent. So for now, she has stayed on as an MP, though she may simply be biding her time for a moment when her resignation and another special election will be maximally inconvenient for Sunak.

The Dorries affair has had an entertaining reality-show vibe, but the sorry business of Johnson’s list has brought renewed scrutiny to a peerage system already fallen into disrepute. And this sense of institutional crisis has only intensified with the news this week of Truss’s leaving list: Of her four reported nominees for the House of Lords, one was her deputy chief of staff for her 49-day tenure as prime minister, and another was a think-tank ally who supported the disastrous economic plan that sealed her fate.

Back in 2021, The Sunday Times reported that “in the past two decades, all 16 of the party’s main treasurers … have been offered a seat in the Lords.” One anonymous source even told the newspaper about a donor “who had been enticed into giving £1 million to the party” because that would lead to a peerage. According to a 2022 estimate by The Guardian, nearly a tenth of Conservative peers had donated more than £100,000 ($127,000) to the party.

The use of peerages for patronage, a phlegmatic constitutional historian wrote some years ago, may be a useful “lubricant” to help a prime minister achieve their objectives. But one consequence of the unchecked practice has been the ballooning membership of the second chamber. As it is, we have to be grateful for the absentees: If all 779 members turned up at once, there’d be no room.

A second, more serious consequence has been growing public support for reform of the Lords—including calls for its abolition. Where the Blair government failed, today’s leader of the opposition Labour Party has proposed to take on the cause of reform. But the task for Sir Keir Starmer—knighted in 2014 for his work as the head of the government prosecution service—is fiendishly difficult. Such constitutional reform would absorb an immense amount of political capital, time, and energy, with very little assurance that regular voters would reward the effort.

This creates an impossible conundrum: Opinion polling shows that Britons have little faith in a system that corrodes their trust, yet they’re unlikely to thank their political leaders for fixing it. Senior members of the House of Lords worry about the institution’s reputation, and have for some time argued for reductions in its size and susceptibility to political patronage.

Not long ago, I was invited to a party at the House of Lords thrown for an old friend who had been awarded a major honor—to protect this person’s privacy, let’s call it the Order of the Bedchamber (the honors system furnishes stranger antiquarian titles than that, in fact). I do admire this person’s achievements, but I was brought up in a communist family, and so, at this function, I felt a bit like Richard Dawkins at a Quaker meeting: love the people but wonder if they’ve secretly been raiding the drinks cabinet.

The room at the Palace of Westminster was high-ceilinged, its walls lined with large 18th-century paintings of sea battles, its mullioned windows overlooking the Thames. The physical setting was the perfect embodiment of nostalgia for imperial glory combined with an air of unfit-for-purposeness in the modern world. I remarked on this to a hard-working Labour baroness I know. “It’s why so many of them want to be in the Lords,” she said. “Move out of this place, and half of them would give up their peerages.”

[Christopher Hitchens: Almost noble]

Moving the legislature out of the Palace of Westminster—which is literally crumbling, with major leaks from its roof and pipes and falling masonry—is what any less hidebound polity would do. MPs and peers will not consider this and instead spend billions of pounds shoring up the building. It should, of course, be turned into a museum.

If this sounds iconoclastic, it is partly because, though I have never been offered an honor, I am one of a fairly large number of Britons who wouldn’t accept one anyway. Far from being posthumously delighted, my late mother would revolve in her biodegradable casket were I to accept a “gong.” In turning down an honor, I would join such surprising refuseniks as Rudyard Kipling, T. E. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Paul Scofield, David Bowie, and Nigella Lawson.

Others have refused honors or, in some cases, theatrically returned them because of the association with imperialism. But the Order of the British Empire could be renamed sometime soon. There’ll be a culture-war battle about it, but Britain can’t go on with an award named for a political entity that no longer exists and serves only as a reminder of an inglorious history of subjugating other peoples. But even that limited reform of the honors system will require a reckoning with the desire of British people—including those who are not Old Etonians like Johnson but who, like Dorries, have had to strive—to live upstairs in the great house and look down on others.