PLAY YOUR CARDS RIGHT FOR A CBE
CAROLE MALONE
MAYBE if I lose three stone on Celebrity Fit Club and then maybe if I get to host a new diet show where I help even more people lose weight then who knows, this time next year I could be Carole Malone CBE, Carole Malone OBE, or even the Very Honourable and Worshipful Dame Carole.
Just imagine it, for my services to obesity I'd get the best tables at restaurants, I'd have a cheque book with Dame printed on it on it (in gold leaf, naturally) not to mention a bank account at Coutts who, in my present overdrawn and Dameless state, have made it clear they want nothing to do with me.
People everywhere would doff their caps and speak to me in that hushed, respectful way reserved only for those our own dear Queen has smiled upon. I'd get invited to all the best parties because everyone wants to say they know a Dame.
You may laugh, but it seems these days all you have to do to get a Lordship, a Sirship or a Dameship is to bung Tony Blair's Government large amounts of wonga - or be a celebrity who has sung a few songs or presented a few TV shows.
And just to confirm our Honours system is what actor Albert Finney once described as a "disease which perpetuates snobbery", we discover that this year Tom Jones the Boyo of the Valleys is being made a Sir.
Yes, that's the same Tom Jones who loved Britain so much that the minute he made a few bob he left the Green Green Grass of home to live in LA where he spent the next 25 years shagging everything with a pulse, earning obscene amounts of money for having women's knickers thrown at him and thrusting his hips at hysterical fans all the while avoiding having to pay tax here in Britain. Oh yes, a real patriot!
Then there's Bruce Forsyth, who's getting a CBE. This is the man who loves his public so much that he once threw me out of his house because I worked for a newspaper he considered to be downmarket. He said only wanted to talk to journalists from the broadsheets.
When I pointed out to him it was the people who read the tabloids NOT the broadsheets who'd made him rich enough to live in a multi-million-pound house in the middle of Surrey's posh Virginia Water golf course, he still removed the cup of tea from my hand and threw me out. Yes, a real man of the people.
It's absolutely wrong that people who are good singers and TV hosts are honoured in this way. Should Mick Jagger have got a Sirship - the man who is to family values what Hitler was to race relations? Should Pete Waterman have got an OBE for becoming a multi-millionaire? Should Chris Tarrant have got an OBE for becoming a multi-multi-millionaire?
Or should honours go to this country's unsung heroes, ordinary people who do extraordinary things, often at huge cost or at great risk to themselves, people who have distinguished themselves by their courage, their dedication, their hard work, their selflessness, their charity work or their sporting achievement.
Yes, every member of the England cricket squad who won the Ashes last year and brought pride and joy back to Britain absolutely deserved their MBEs.
And yes, it's right that Seb Coe has been knighted - but shouldn't all the members of the Olympic Bid team who worked every bit as hard as he did to bring the Games to London also have been honoured?
The fact is, entertainers - singers, dancers, TV personalities - are all paid obscene amounts of money for work that isn't terribly hard, which should be reward enough.
Let's save the real honours - not for those who can buy them or who are that dreaded thing A Celebrity - but for those who truly deserve them.
And that's Britain's big-hearted , brave, unsung heroes who every day in some incredible way remind us why there's still the word Great in Britain.
Sundaymirror
