Knights out

“Be careful what you wish for!” is the finger-wagging threat oft-made by maiden aunts, crusty medieval crones and, the generally annoying.

Some years ago plain, vanilla Paul McCartney was ritually referred to in Smash Hits magazine as "Sir Fab Macca Wacky Thumbs Aloft". To this day I don't think anyone knows why he needed a nickname, but he certainly did (and does still) have a tendency to extend his thumbs skyward whenever adoring crowds are near. Anyway, in 1997 - long after the Hits first applied the moniker - Macca became a knight proper for "for services to music". Be careful what you wish for indeed.

Roll on another 15 years, and no sooner has Thumbs Aloft belted out his final "na-na-na-nah" to close the London 2012 opening ceremony, than the show's creative director is being installed by Twitter patrons as "Sir" Danny Boyle.

This was no flippant idea, but an earnest attempt to promote Boyle's investiture in recognition of his incredible tour de force on July 27. Such groundswell inevitably led to newspapers reporting that Boyle would be a shoe-in for a gong come the New Year's Honours list. Boyle himself - a dyed-in-the-wool member of the fraternity unlikely to support such things - has so far simply laughed it all off with a curt "I don’t think so".

Even if Boyle turns down a KBE, there will be no shortage of Olympic heroes and heroines queuing up at the Palace to be entitled. Indeed in the proud national glow that followed the London games, Twitter was "awash" (the modern equivalent of switchboards being "jammed") with suggestions that virtually anyone who pulled on a Team GB tracksuit this summer should get the nod for a meeting with James Bond's new parachuting partner, Her Majesty, The Queen. Fleet Street layout artists have no doubt already prepared their front page splashes for the final week of December to declare "Arise Sir Mo!" or "Arise Dame Jess!".

There have been past precedents for such populist clamour to actually succeed: Bruce Forsyth (for non-British readers of WWDBD?, the nation's pre-eminent octogenarian game show host, golfer and catchphrase merchant) endured years of humiliation with just a CBE to his name before HMTQ  wiped the ceremonial cutlass on his newly-knighted shoulders and said "Nice to see you, Sir Brucie, to see you, nice!".

A similar, but less well supported campaign has been lurking in the shadows to have David Beckham knighted in recognition of his services to hairdressers and tattoo parlours.

Old Goldenballs is, I concede, a national icon. Like Mr Bean replacing Benny Hill, Beckham has replaced Bobby Charlton as a shorthand reference for Britain. You can find yourself in the remotest, far-flung corner of the earth untouched by the English language or modernity itself, and you will still - at the slightest hint of Britishness - be met with a smile and the collection of syllables that is "David Beckham! Yes. Very good!".

Beckham is, of course, more than just an underwear model with excellent ball skills - sorry, that should have read "excellent footballer who dabbles in underwear modeling" - and his charidee work, not to mention salesmanship to help land the 2012 Olympics for London, does mark him out as a worthy candidate for national honour. But I do struggle to see why we should be collectively preparing to welcome Sir David and Lady Posh into the pantheon of great Britons knighted or damed (not sure if that's correct, but it's only one letter short of a curse, so it will do).

There are those in the British establishment who've never quite got over the number of actors being knighted, let alone rock stars like messrs McCartney, Jagger and John (which would make an interesting firm of suburban solicitors), whose knighthoods placed dual stamps in the passport marked Sodom and Gomorrah.

So with this we read that the Public Administration Select Committee, the British parliamentary institution responsible for, er, public adminstration, has called for a change in the honours system. T'committee has called for an independent commission to ensure that any government obsessed with image and spin doesn't do anything ridiculous like awarding all five members of One Direction gongs for whatever it is they do.

More importantly, the committee has called for greater transparency and less influence by politicians and their civil servants in the selection process of honours candidates: "We believe that no-one should be honoured for simply 'doing the day job', no matter what that job is,"  t'committee states.

Well if that doesn't set the proverbial big cat amongst the Clacton pigeons, I don't know what will. Because beyond pop stars and Olympians getting rewarded for generally being excellent and putting a smile on people's faces, there are still too many gongs being handed out to senior civil servants and business leaders on the basis that they are due one.

The select committee's chairman, Bernard Jenkin MP, points out that many Britons struggle to understand why the bulk of honours are handed out, which doesn't help public confidence in the system. "In particular," says Jenkin, "honours should not be awarded to civil servants or businessmen unless it can be demonstrated that there has been service above and beyond the call of duty."


And, capturing the spirit of these beleaguered, austere times he adds: "It is distasteful and damaging for people who already command vast personal remuneration packages for doing their job, to also be honoured for simply being at the helm of large companies. This must stop."

However, a spokesman for the government has denied that establishment figures and celebs dominate the honours system, running the old yarn about three-quarters of awards go to "ordinary" people who do charity work.

That, of course, wouldn't rule out a Beckham knighthood, even if he is also at the helm of a large commercial enterprise - David Beckham....

Forgive us if we get a little Churchillian

"Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.' " - Winston Churchill, House of Commons, June 18, 1940

In the time it took for my companion to visit and return from the pub toilet yesterday evening, Great Britain had added another gold medal - the second of three won within the space of an hour. 

We had only called in for a quick pint to refresh a bike ride on a warm Paris evening. Well, I'd called in for a quick pint, but that's not the point: while we were in there we witnessed scenes of unprecedented jubilation not seen since Chelsea's unlikely Champion's League Final victory, on another Saturday evening in May.

In an hour we witnessed all five-feet-five-inches of Jessica Ennis complete the heptathalon with a storming 800-metre run in two minutes 8.65secs, winning the gold medal by a massive 306-point margin; and then, while my friend was taking care of business, Greg Rutherford was delivering a 8.31-metre long jump.

And then came Mo: Mo Farah, who came to Britain from Somalia at the age of eight to escape civil war in his homeland, to devote himself to becoming the first Briton to win the longest Olympic track discipline, the 10,000 metres. It was a genuinely tear-jerking victory. At the end of a day when the tear ducts of many in Britain were getting a very handsome workout indeed.

Those three medals, earned in front of the full 80,000 crowd at the Olympic Stadium, might have been enough to satisfy, but they followed three British gold medals picked up earlier in the day thanks to the women's and men's rowing at Eton Dorney, and another stunning cycling performance, with the women's pursuit team setting a new world record in the Velodrome. Even the departure of Team GB's football team - a quarter-final defeat at the feet of penalties (sound familiar?) - didn't dampen the euphoria of the day.

For a country that prides itself on self-depreciation, that regards The Great Escape as a success story (even though it all ended in abject failure), and which revels in the foreign view that we are a nation collectively lacking self-esteem, these last few days have been days in which it's been OK to be proud to be British.

It's something we've lost the art of. Perhaps we didn't even have it. Whereas Americans have got national pride down pat (a chant of "U-S-A, U-S-A!" can break out spontaneously for the most trivial of events), we Brits can't wave a union flag without feeling ever so slightly gauche.

Britain is, "Like shy party guests who drop their guard and find themselves having an unexpectedly good time," to quote the Sunday Times' James Gillespie today. I would emphasise the "unexpectedly". And he's right. Seb Coe might have slightly pompously branded London 2012 "the People's Games" (surely that was Beijing?), but it does feel like Britain is pitching in to have a good time.

Political correctness has confused national pride with jingoism, that by waving the flag of union is some sort of anachronistic throwback to an imperial past and the shame of colonial abuse. Or worse, that it is a nationalistic symbol at odds with the country's multi-cultural present.

Those who can't help getting their knickers in a twist about this sort of thing are welcome to carry on experiencing discomfort in their lower regions. While they do, the rest of us will be getting on with celebrating an incredible eight days, eight days when the national pastime of moaning about one thing or another has been put on hold, and the eyes of the world have been on London like never before.

And while we're at it, let's celebrate the fact that, the stadium that had played host to "leftie, multi-cultural crap" (A. Burley MP, Cons) in the Olympic opening ceremony just over a week before, last night witnessed a Yorkshire lass of mixed ethnicity, a ginger bloke from Milton Keynes, and a former Somali emigré who calls Feltham home, winning gold medals on the most amazing sporting Saturday night ever.  

But most of all, let's celebrate the fact that Britain is having a good time. The country may be knee-deep in recession, and heading for a third dip in the economic mire, but there seems to be - from this side of the English Channel, at least, the smile of enjoyment on the nation's visage. 

It is still only Day 9 of London 2012. By the same stage in Beijing, Britain had just seven gold medals. Today it has 16, the best British performance in 104 years. Even if Team GB doesn't pick up another piece of gold, silver or bronze between now and August 14, I doubt you'll be able to wipe the smile off British faces. After which, we'll return to our cynicism, our unemployment, our class divisions, our transport chaos and all the other things that seem to make Britain happiest when it is moaning about them.