Photograph by sbclick, 2011 (CC-BY-1.0)

In theory the monarch can bestow practically any accolade on any person at any time and for any reason. In practice, since the late Victorian age there has been a trend towards grouping announcements into two big lists each year – one in June for the sovereign’s official birthday, one in December for the upcoming new year. There are also smaller lists issued at irregular intervals to commemorate particular events e.g. the deaths of senior royals, the dissolutions of parliaments and the resignations of prime ministers. The latter two types tend to be particularly controversial.

Wikipedians have generally maintained pages for all of the lists, great and small. They  have also created an annual page called “Special Honours”, which they use as a catch-all term for those titles and decorations which were issued outside of any named occasion.

Today’s announcement is a little confusing for those seeking categorisation – the Prime Minister’s office has released a list of honours and appointments for March 2024. The document as a whole does not have any particular name, but paragraphs within it do: Creative Industries Honours, Technology & Artificial Intelligence Honours, and Political Honours. The former has provoked the most recognition, appointing film producer Emma Thomas as a DBE and her husband Christopher Nolan (already a CBE since 2019) as a knight bachelor. There is also a short list new privy counsellors (e.g. Vaughan Gething, recently appointed as First Minister of Wales), though whether these count as honours in the way knighthoods do is debatable.

This new publication comes just forty-eight days after the list of “Political Peerages” (e.g. yet more new members of the House of Lords). It eludes me why today’s list was not brought forward to be merged with that one, or pushed back to fold in with the Birthday Honours in June. The only likely explanation is that these were Rishi Sunak’s personal picks and he (or His Majesty) wanted that distinction made clear in the public mind. Of course, that could also have been achieved by waiting for the looming dissolution honours at this year’s general election – or indeed Sunak’s resignation honours, which may well come earlier!