New Year's Honours: A knighthood for Lynton Crosby marks new low for the honours system

The honours list contains far too many people rewarded for their services to the Conservative Party

Lynton Crosby was brought in by the Conservatives in 2005 to manage their unsuccessful general election campaign (Getty)

Such is the annual debasement of Britain’s honours system there are many who think themselves – through bitter experience – inoculated against outrage on the subject. Yet the knighthood for Lynton Crosby is likely to bring even these types out in a fever. It marks a low point, in an institution not unaccustomed to swimming about in the gutters of political life.

Mr Crosby – the title of “Sir” waits upon his investiture – performed his job, as chief of Conservative election strategy, exceedingly well. By targeting huge resources on a few thousand voters in the most marginal constituencies, he was crucial to delivering the party’s surprise majority. All Tories have reason to thank him. But Mr Crosby was simply doing his job – the one he was paid a reported £500,000 to carry out. Throwing in a gong only serves to debase the value of the awards to those who truly went beyond the “call of duty” in service to their country.

This remains a vital point, though it is not a novel one. Most of the 1,000 or so individuals on the New Year Honours list earn a place through self-sacrifice and contributions to public life.

Consider how some of the current cohort must feel to see Mr Crosby standing alongside them, not to mention previous recipients, from the unknown – such as 80-year-old Jack Denness, who completed more than 100 marathons and raised £100,000 for charity – to the titans of British life. It will only add to the disquiet that serious questions have been raised (and left unanswered) about Mr Crosby’s tax affairs, including whether he operates as a non-dom and if the Maltese companies he owns are being used to shelter income.

It is unlikely that Mr Crosby requested such a title as part of his employment package. The offer, one assumes, will have been freely made by Downing Street.

Neither can the motivation be interpreted so kindly as to call it simply generosity; David Cameron is, at this moment, seeking to ensure that Mr Crosby stays on his side on the question of membership of the EU. The knighthood will probably mitigate the risk of Mr Crosby, understood to be privately Eurosceptic, applying his considerable talents in the service of the Out campaign.

How exactly those talents have been applied, though, further taints the affair. Rather than promote community cohesion, Mr Crosby actively sought to divide the nation in the run-up to the 2015 general election, whether it be through allowing the “racist vans” to travel the country’s streets, telling undocumented immigrants to “go home”, or stoking anti-Scottish sentiment over the issue of the SNP’s relationship with Ed Miliband.

In defence of the appointment, it is said that Mr Cameron is merely continuing an old trend. Margaret Thatcher elevated her long-time confidant Sir Bernard Ingham, and election adviser Lord Bell; the Blair government raised up party strategist Lord Gould. Yet these cases – unseemly as one might argue they are – do not compare with Mr Crosby’s. Sir Bernard had a long-running career as a civil servant before joining Mrs Thatcher as her press secretary, and remains a figure in public life; Lord Bell founded and still runs the Bell Pottinger PR firm, which has created hundreds of jobs; Lord Gould dedicated his working life to the Labour Party, helping define New Labour and writing the seminal book on party reform: The Unfinished Revolution. None was rewarded for a single job done well; all had an attachment to the UK that went far beyond employment.

As ever, the honours list contains far too many people rewarded for their services to the Conservative Party, such as donor Jacqueline Gold and the treasurer of the Scottish party branch. But it can now be said that Mr Crosby has performed another job people thought was impossible: that of taking the reputation of the honours system to new depths.