Never Trust a Ferret

A hunting ferret

Janet Street-Porter is a woman of strong opinions - and one of the few women in the UK ever to have edited a national newspaper.

But what I most like about Janet is her 'spit in your eye' attitude - towards goings and public honours which she wrote about in The Independent on Sunday.

Like me, Janet wouldn't cross the road for an OBE or a knighthood - and ridicules people that do - the kind of people who pee their pants just waiting in the queue.

Like me, Janet has not time for Sir Fred 'the Shred' Goodwin - who 'looks like a ferret' she says and that's a good enough reason for mistrusting him in my book.

But of course Sir Fred wasn't mistrusted - quite the opposite in fact.

Because as everyone knows Sir Fred was actively courted and fawned over by senior figures in the last Labour government - which did 'bugger-all to deal with banking excesses' - according to Janet.

And you know what - she's absolutely right - here's what Janet had to say in her  newspaper column at the weekend.

They pile in to damn Sir Fred's gong, but what will it change

Politicians are jumping over each other to demand that the disgraced former RBS chief Fred "the Shred" Goodwin should be stripped of his knighthood. Why? What difference would it make? I can see that the ritual of public humiliation might turn some people on, but this futile gesture won't help the huge number of folk fruitlessly looking for work or trying to pay bills. It won't build a single affordable home, fund a crèche or keep a library open. Ed Miliband is the latest lemming to demand Fred's head on a platter, telling anyone who'll listen that Gordon Brown should "never" have handed out the accolade in the first place.

Goodwin is an easy person to loathe. He's a bit common, looks like a ferret, and has never publicly graced us with a full apology. He still lives in a posh house with mega-security in a swanky part of Edinburgh. What do Dave, Cleggy and Ed want? That he should walk down Whitehall in sackcloth having custard pies chucked at him by angry voters?

There are plenty of people as loathsome as Sir Fred – our former prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, for starters, with their self-important charitable foundations and conspicuous lack of humility about their track records; their huge "expenses"; their trumpeting of their desire to "help" the underprivileged on a global scale; their refusal consistently to accept blame.

Taking away Goodwin's knighthood will not make any difference to the bonus culture or the deeply entrenched mindset in the City. The people who run our country have had more than three years to get cross about his gong, so why are politicians so incandescent with rage now? Almost certainly because they know they are powerless to prevent the steady flow of bad news on all fronts.

Unemployment is at a record high. The high street is in crisis, with liquidations every week. More young people than ever have been sitting around doing nothing for more than a year. There's the ever-present danger of a double-dip recession. The euro teeters on the brink of collapse. We seem to be blundering through a maze of misery, so (they seem to have decided) why not pick on an easily identifiable bloke and make him the scapegoat for all the current woes? Why not try and distract voters with a fall guy?

The truth is, Fred G was just one of many. The Labour government did bugger-all to deal with banking excesses. And when the crunch came, they still treated bankers as a special case. Ann Godbehere, the woman brought in by Labour to sort out Northern Rock's financial mess, was allowed to base her tax affairs outside the UK. And they appointed a new chairman, Ron Sandler, a non-dom whose £8m London house was owned by an overseas trust.

Labour chose these two key people to be in charge of billions of pound's worth of public money when we bailed out the bank – people who enjoyed tax breaks that were denied to ordinary people. So forgive my cynicism. I can't see that any politicians are committed to changing the way that bankers and tax avoiders operate. If they did, we would have signed up for the Robin Hood Tax, a levy on all financial transactions, a simple decision that would change charitable giving overnight and really help the needy.

Another thing about knighthoods is that they're worthless, a snobbish relic that reinforces our class-ridden, socially stagnant society. Terry Leahy, Philip Green, Stuart Rose and Richard Branson were all knighted for services to retail and various types of enterprise. In reality, they were already lavishly rewarded financially for their job. So why garnish their CVs with a gong? In the US, knighthoods don't exist, you are valued by your peers according to how well your business is doing. The US is a true meritocracy. We still believe titles carry clout.

When Simon Schama trashed Downton Abbey as "a steaming, silvered tureen of snobbery", he hit the nail right on the head. There's a nasty little corner buried in the British psyche that secretly aches for a gong, that can't help itself genuflecting to a title. Sir Mick Jagger sold out when he accepted one. Ditto Sir Bob Geldof. Sir Fred's title is an irrelevance, not worthy of a moment's concern.

A hunting Sir Fred Goodwin