Anyone with any sense or shame would run a mile from a Liz Truss gong

The process of vetting the former prime minister’s resignation honours list has taken much longer than she survived in Number 10 – and the only people who might deserve one have already turned it down, writes Tom Peck

Former prime minister Liz Truss (PA)

Wherever Liz Truss goes, farce follows, so it should be no surprise that at least two of the people on her auto-absurd resignation honours list have refused to accept the honour she has tried to bestow on them.

One has already let it be known that they would be “too humiliated” to accept the honour.

Sadly, said person has so far spoken only anonymously. You can see why. To publicly state you have turned down the chance to be publicly recognised for your contribution to the six-week-long Truss administration would be very nearly as damaging as accepting the honour in the first place.

But not quite. This particular farce has more than a flavour of Groucho Marx about it. He, as is well known, once said he would not want to part of any club that would have him as a member. Of the fourteen names on Truss’s honours list, the only one you would possibly want to have any kind of role in the life of the nation, either honorific or via a peerage, would certainly be the one with enough residual shame to turn it down.

No luck, sadly, with the rest. That the administrative rigmarole around Truss’s resignation honours list has thus far lasted almost seven times longer than the administration itself is already more than farcical enough, though for understandable reasons.

The authorities do not appear to have the systems in place to process more than one resignation honours list at once. They have, presumably, been working on the now wrong assumption that an entire government should outlast the outgoing formalities of the previous one. And they were also held up by the also unforeseen problems of a prime minister, Boris Johnson, seeking to hand out a knighthood to his dad, who is best known to the British public for breaking lockdown rules and beating up his wife.

It’s not been made entirely clear who is going to get what in the Truss list. In sport, certain world records still have asterisks by them to denote that while they cannot be formally removed from the ledger, it should be known that they were won by athletes from regimes since revealed to have been engaged in systematic and occasionally enforced doping programmes at the time.

In recent years, the Tories have already inadvertently introduced the same practise to the system of public honours. If you were awarded a CBE (Truss), are you sure you’d be brave enough to wear it on any formal occasion? People will inevitably ask how you got it, you would have to tell them, and then immediately watch them pretend to need the toilet then go and talk to somebody else.

Of the names already rumoured to be on the list, you can see the honours now. Ruth Porter MBE – for Moderately Banjaxing The Economy. Matthew Elliott OBE – for Obliterating the Economy. And finally Kwasi Kwarteng CBE – Commander of Banjaxing the Economy.

Naturally, the most farcical aspect of all are the elevations to the House of Lords. It is hard to imagine any more certain evidence that the Lords must be abolished than the now-established practice of the appointment to it of all people directly responsible for the trashing of the country.

One person Truss intends to honour with a peerage is Mark Littlewood, the former head of the Institute of Economic Affairs, and his mate Matthew Elliott, the former head of Vote Leave. These are the people whose ideas so inspired her to entirely ruin the country and render herself a permanent, not even asterisked embarrassment in the history books. Everything these people believe has been demonstrated to be entirely idiotic. If they were even fractionally less ridiculous people, Liz Truss might still be prime minister. The only upside of giving them places in the House of Lords is that their presence would remove any moral case whatsoever for not abolishing it.

Littlewood, or Baron Littlewood of Tufton Street as he will surely hereafter be known, has already been stung once for promising privileged access to politicians in return for donations to his think tank. To have been done for cash-for-access while not even having any access is a mark of truly audacious venality. But his reward for it is not less access but more.

There is, naturally, no defence for any of it, but it is nevertheless a remarkable quirk of the system. The Tories are flailing around like a fish on land precisely because they know the game is up, that they’ve been found out, and there’s nothing they can do. But the baubles of their humiliation last forever. If only everyone had the sense, and the shame, to run a mile.