AT A mundane level the knighthood for Tory MP Iain Duncan Smith in the new year’s honours should not be a surprise.

The honours list has to go through a bureaucratic approval process after ministers make their recommendations. 

In all likelihood Duncan Smith’s name appeared on the list on the assumption that he would lose his parliamentary seat at the December 12 election. Unfortunately he narrowly avoided doing so to an excellent Labour candidate.

The scale of protest at the knighthood rightly reflects a much deeper disquiet at where Tory Britain is now headed.

At least the political aspect of the honours system has long been discredited with dodgy and doubtful appointments. The late Labour prime minister Harold Wilson was known for it.

The Tories have gone much further into the world of patronage and sinecures though.

An important signal of the change was when former England cricketer Geoffrey Boycott was awarded a knighthood in Theresa May’s resignation honours list. May is a cricket fan and Boycott is a keen Brexiteer. 

However he had previously been denied an honour on the basis that he had a conviction in a French court for assaulting a previous partner.

This was one of the rules of the honours system. An appointment might be dodgy or controversial but they should not be someone convicted of an offence. May swept that aside.

Then we come to the peerage for former Labour MP John Mann and his reported appointment as “anti-semitism tsar.” 

Whether this is a job with a salary and a job description seems unclear. For the time being Mann has confined himself to tweeting on various tendentious matters and ignoring requests from the author Michael Rosen to look into anti-semitism in the Tory Party. 

Mann’s job, such as it is, looks rather like an early 19th-century sinecure. That is a role based on who someone is linked with or is in favour with rather than merit as such.

The knighthood for Duncan Smith is rather different but very much within the same framework.

Duncan Smith has certainly never been accused of or found guilty of any crime. Of course people argue that his policies when a minister led and still lead to people living in poverty and on occasion sadly taking their own lives. 

Neither his current job nor his previous government roles is anything but absolutely genuine though.

In a sense this is the problem. Duncan Smith’s idea was to recast welfare benefits in the way the 1834 Poor Law had seen them. 

That was underwritten by the “less eligibility” principle — so if someone was unable to support themselves by working they could enter a workhouse which, however, would always be less attractive than the most menial and low-paid job.

Duncan Smith saw universal credit in much the same way. It didn’t work out like that. Thanks to a low-wage economy, many in work also had to claim it in order to survive and there was and is a constant tension between those who the state claims are fit for work and who very obviously in fact are not.

The Poor Law and the workhouse were finally abolished in 1929 but they and those who ran the system were hated. 

Duncan Smith is in the same league and giving him a knighthood simply brings the honours system into fresh disrepute.

William Cobbett writing about honours in 1815 said: “Abuses of power when tolerated to any degree eventually grow into excess. The corrupt instance becomes at length the general practice.”