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Even Kylie can't fill the hole in the honours list

Here's Kylie receiving her OBE from Prince Charles this morning. Captions are welcome but we have a pretty good idea of what she's saying:

Thanks Sir. Now where can I find Ringo?

You can't. And a nation weeps.

But where was Ringo?

Another Honours list, another blow for justice. Where, oh where, was Ringo Starr's name?

On a day when a 25-year-old made Knight of the Garter, it appears that Ringo has been passed over once more.

Unhappy day. But our fight will continue...

Come on Sir Mick. Show Ringo some love

Hugo Rifkind raises an excellent point in this morning's People.

It seems that Sir Mick Jagger has signed a No 10 petition calling for a knighthood for Ken Dodd. And yet, on the petition for Ringo Starr’s knighthood, nothing. Get it together, Sir Mick.

Quite.

Why isn't it Sir Ringo?

The paper joins our campaign...

A Starr role in the Birthday Honours

Right. James Purnell, are you reading this?

Liverpool's reign as European City of Culture has begun. Ringo is playing on the rooftops.

So to my list of ten reasons why Ringo must be knighted I add this one.

It is now timely.

We're right behind you Sir Ringo

Has someone tipped Ringo the wink? I still remain committed to the knighthood campaign and determined that it should succeed.

So I was buoyed up by this exchange between the great man and Mojo magazine:

Q: Have you heard that there’s a writer for The Times lobbying for you to be offered a knighthood?
A: I’ve heard about it, yeah.

Q: Were the offer to be made, would you accept?
A: I can’t answer that question – in case I am, hahaha! That situation is pretty crazy.

Intriguing.

Ringo and power law

Today is the last day to sign the Ringo petition. It has done respectably well in terms of signatures. The theory underpinning it has, I would say, performed spectacularly.

I offered (still offer) Ringo's knighthood as a rare example of something on the Downing Street site that could actually be acted upon.

My argument was that the site would soon fill up with petitions the Government could do nothing about since they opposed existing policy, cost too much money or were simply mad. Even if a petition garnered a million signatures, it might be advancing a proposition that the rest of the population did not agree with, or, if they did, was in direct conflict with the programme of the elected government.

And lo, so it came to pass.

I'd love someone with a spare hour or four to do some work on the petition site. Am I wrong, or do the signatures to petitions distribute themselves exactly according to a power law? It seems to the naked eye that 80 per cent of the signatures are on 20 per cent of the petitions and that there is a very long tail of petitions with hardly any supporters.

If this is right, it would suggest that there is nothing particularly remarkable about the road pricing petition, merely that it is the first of a series of such petitions that will lead the site.

Ringo campaign gets parliamentary interest

I provide the following exchange in the House of Commons with awe but without comment:

Mr. Jim McGovern (Dundee, West) (Lab): On how many occasions her Department provided advice to members of the public on the nomination of individuals for honours within her Department's areas of responsibilities in the last 12 months.

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (Mr. David Lammy): The Department regularly provides advice and guidance to members of the public on all aspects of the honours process, including how to nominate someone for an award. We do not keep a record of the number of occasions on which we have provided information to members of the public.

Mr. McGovern: I thank my hon. Friend for that response. He may be aware that more than 1,500 people have signed a petition asking the Queen to grant Ringo Starr a knighthood. Despite my grave misgivings about the honours system—in fact, my opposition to it; I regard it as anachronistic—it appears that at least some members of the public take an interest in who receives the awards. With that in mind, does my hon. Friend agree that it might be an idea to open up the honours system to greater democratic accountability, rather than having the fairly obscure, opaque system that we currently have?

Mr. Lammy: I hope that my hon. Friend will acknowledge that there has been progress on the honours system since the new committees were set up. In effect, they have a panel of experts who can decide who merits an honour on the basis of comparing candidates. My hon. Friend will also appreciate, I suspect, that popularity is just one indication of merit.

(With a big hat tip to Dizzy)

More Ringo coverage

I can't believe I missed this while I was away.

Have you signed yet?

The Sun backs our Sir Ringo campaign!

The great British institution that is The Sun has joined forced with Comment Central to add more power to the bandwagon of the Ringo knighthood campaign.

Check out The Sun's contribution here.

Sign the Downing Street petition here, but if you're not British, simply show your support here.

10 reasons why Ringo should be knighted

10 Downing Street have been considering for some time now whether to allow petitions for honours on their new site. They have been persuaded that they should. Read here my original post on why this campaign first got started.

So the Ringo petition is now live. If you are British, sign on to the Downing Street site here. If you aren't, then please post your support here.

In the meantime, here are 10 unanswerable reasons why Ringo should soon be Sir Richard:

1. The Beatles are not just another pop group they changed popular culture.
2. Ringo has an MBE. Tom Jones has a knighthood.
3. The Beatles are a symbol of this country's creativity that is recognised in every part of the globe.
4. Ringo has an MBE. Cliff Richard has a knighthood.
5. Have you heard the drumming on Abbey Road?
6. Ringo has an MBE. Errol Brown of Hot Chocolate has an MBE.
7. Before Ringo joined the Beatles they were nothing.
8. Ringo has an MBE. Gerry Marsden of Gerry and the Pacemakers has an MBE.
9. Have you seen Help?
10. Ringo has an MBE. Jeffrey Archer has a peerage.

Only you can right this wrong.

Ringo Update

Here's my first conclusion about the Downing Street e-petition system - it is incredibly slow.

As you may know, I am testing the system by petitioning the Prime Minister to recommend a knighthood for Ringo Starr. I submitted the petition to the "Approvals team" on Tuesday, but this afternoon it is still not up.

A Downing Street spokesman told me that it takes up to 5 working days to determine whether a petiton will be allowed to proceed. Why?

In the meantime, please post your support for Sir Ringo at the comments section of the original post.

Sign up to support Sir Ringo!

I don't usually do this, but here is my column today in full. It explains my campaign to get Ringo Starr knighted.

There is a bridge under construction spanning the Danube between Buda and Pest, and I think about it often, always with irritation. You see, it is going to be called the Megyeri Hid, just because it connects Káposztásmegyer and Békásmegye. But this name is an outrage, a fraud, a robbery. And before you walk away shrugging your shoulders, I must tell you that this fraud is about to be perpetrated on you.

In the summer Hungary’s Ministry of Economic Affairs and Transport decided to hold a public vote on its website. The subject — what should the new bridge connecting Káposztásmegyer and Békásmegye be called?

Within days, fans of the US martial arts actor Chuck Norris had pushed his name to the top of the ballot. Now, Chuck Norris turned down a role in Karate Kid on a point of principle, so obviously he deserves to have a bridge named after him. But, in the end, he didn’t win. The American satirist Stephen Colbert launched a campaign to have the structure named after him instead. And in a two-way fight with the Croatian-Hungarian national hero, Miklós Zrínyi, the comedian romped home. More people voted for him than the entire population of Hungary. The Stephen Colbert Hid it would be.

Oh no it wouldn’t. It was announced that Colbert had won but couldn’t have the bridge named after him unless he spoke fluent Hungarian and was deceased. The comedian felt unable to comply with the latter condition and the Hungarian Geographical Name Committee duly named the structure the Megyeri Hid.

Why do I recount this cautionary tale? Because a similar form of bogus democracy is heading to a computer near you.

The Downing Street website is beta-testing (a fancy phrase used by computer people that means testing) an open petition system, and last month the Shadow Chancellor George Osborne canvassed the idea of copying the Estonian Government’s Today You Decide website, in which the petition is followed by a vote.

These sound like good ideas. Who could be against allowing people to express their opinion like this? Well, er, actually I think I might be. Anyone who has had the experience of being “consulted” by their local council will see why I am wary. If there’s anything worse than having a bigger council tax it is being told that local voters supported it in some sort of phoney consultation exercise.

And if you look down the list of Downing Street petitions, is there one, a single one, you can actually imagine making a difference? 4,391 people have signed a petition to scrap the independent nuclear deterrent, 1,629 want Mr Blair to stand on his head and juggle ice cream (“if he’s not going to resign, the least he can do is provide us with some entertainment”), two people have called on the Prime Minister to allow the sale of elephants in pet shops (“We believe that every child in the UK would benefit from owning an elephant”). I would estimate the chances of success of each of these petitions as roughly equal.

To almost every idea on the Downing Street site there is an obvious objection — it is patently silly; it costs too much money; it is a Tory idea and this is a Labour Government; it has 14,000 signatures but millions of people are against it; it is a crucial matter of national security and the Prime Minister isn’t going to be told what to do by some guy in Edmonton with a Yahoo! account; Mr Blair doesn’t like ice cream.

These are all reasonable objections and you can’t be too angry with Downing Street for using them. But I rather suspect that even if none of them held, the petitions would still get nowhere. And this is where I need your help. I want you to help me to test the Downing Street petition system.

Last night I submitted a petition to the No 10 approvals team. It may take them a day or two, but given that they accepted a petition for Mr Blair to wear a head-mounted video camera, my hopes of being allowed to proceed are high.

I’ve thought long and hard about the subject. In order for it to be a proper test, the result must be unequivocal. It must be obvious that the desired outcome would not have occurred without the petition and clear, too, that it has really occurred. Looking at those online already, the petition to save the BBC licence fee would fall at the first of these hurdles while the petition to Save Walsall would fall at the second.

Yet while the subject must be something that would not have occurred without a petition it must still be realistic, something that could occur. At the same time, it mustn’t cost any money or impede any other government programme. It must be something that a Labour prime minister might be in favour of yet hasn’t done, even in ten years. And it must be something that some people are in favour of and those who aren’t don’t care all that much about.

This doesn’t leave us with much, which is why the new online petition system is not destined to transform our national life. But I think I have come up with something that might allow us to test the system.

I have petitioned the Prime Minister to recommend to the Queen that she confer a knighthood on Ringo Starr.

Sorry. That’s about the best I could do. Think it’s trivial? Anything much bigger and you wouldn’t haven’t a prayer. And I think Ringo deserves it, don’t you? George Martin has a knighthood and he wasn’t even in the Beatles. Tom Jones has a knighthood, for heaven’s sake (Why, Why, Why, Delilah?). The Beatles helped to change the face of modern culture, so surely there should be an insignia in it for the man who kept the beat.

All I need (apart from love, of course) is for you to go to the Downing Street website or mine and sign up. Then we’ll see how much of a fraud the whole thing is.

If you wish, signal your assent in the comments section of this post.

(RINGO UPDATE: Justice is slow people - Downing Street's initial response to our petition)

(RINGO UPDATE: Better news, Downing Street have approved the petition! So in case you needed it, here are 10 reasons to support Sir Ringo. Sign up here)

(Another RINGO UPDATE: The Sun backs our campaign)

(Yet another RINGO UPDATE: The Daily Mail shows an interest)

(Ridiculous RINGO UPDATE: The House of Commons gets involved)