Who would want a gong anyway?

I even knew the idiot's name. If the truth had been told, he wasn't much good at skulduggery, policing, even, or walking in a straight line. That night I pictured him with Subversion A to Z on his fat lap.

"It's like this," he said.

"Isn't it always?" I replied.

"Someone has been making threats against the person of the Queen."

"The person?"

"Letters have been written. Written and sent to the editor of the Edinburgh Evening News. We would count it a favour . . ."

"No."

"If you wouldn't mind . . .

"No."

"Investigating . . ."

"No."

"Said letters."

"Not a chance."

What they wanted, it transpired, was my professional help in, first, breaking into a fellow journalist's desk. Secondly, in copying the contents. Thirdly, in providing testimony in a court of law, if any. They said it was really important.

Perhaps they told the truth. Perhaps they weren't kidding when they claimed that many - "loads", even - of my professional peers were busily protecting the security of the realm even as we spoke. "I thought I was one of your problems," I said then.

"Grow up" said Plod.

Later in life I would find the catch on the back door sprung, now and then. Sometimes there were strange noises on the phone. Sometimes the mail looked a little dishevelled. Sometimes my desk was not quite as artfully messy as I had remembered. Sometimes, when I wasn't looking my best, I even got my picture taken during public events.

Paranoid? Me? You bet.

They wrote me off, I think, all those years ago. Somewhere there is a dusty file confirming my unreliability. If you are alert, literate and capable of independent thought you have probably earned the same dossier, or one similar. The only advantage you possess is truly old-fashioned: you know that they know that you know . . . And so forth.

You won't be getting a knighthood, though, and certainly not a peerage. Downing Street will not be attempting to buy you off any time soon with the only desirable toy it still possesses. In a middle-class professional life you will probably come across people who have been honoured. You may even know a peer, or encounter a sir and a lady. It won't be you, though.

Why do these people want these things so very badly? Tony Blair's administration is drowning in the backwash from that question. I cannot, as things stand, write any-thing useful, for now, about corrup- tion in British public life. I can merely remark on something strange: people will still do almost anything for "an honour" from the state.

Back at my house, we joke about old and dear friends with Sunday-morning TV shows and knighthoods in the post. We laugh at the old socialists doing their bit for Queen, country and the BBC. It isn't so funny, though, when you strip things to crude basics. Who is the establishment, currently?

They have titles. They parade honorifics and their prefects braid. They wait to be bought by the political establishment, or - let's be crude - by anyone important. Money is the least of their concerns. These people are so complacent they do not even seek influence. They merely wish to "matter".

You have to think it through. When will Jack McConnell win his inevitable peerage? Shortly after he destroys the Labour Party - as we once called it - in Scotland. When will Blair be ennobled? Right after that £10m Murdoch book deal. So when will I get my knighthood? There the argument begins to fall apart, somewhat.

Or rather, that's when the analysis begins to come together. Blair's alleged corruption is less a matter of what has been done, or not done (let the lawyers argue it out) for the sake of baubles down at Westminster. It comes down to an argument over what rich people really want. That I should say "sir"? That I should call someone "lord"? It won't happen. Wrong century.

Grant this, nevertheless: Blair's crowd have inclined towards corruption because some people are inclined, very inclined, to be corrupted. Everyone buys the ermine. All knights - keep a special eye on those journalists - purchase their credit. "They'd tear your arm off," said a colleague who declined a minor disgrace of his own a few years back. He was talking about captains of our local cottage industries.

They would, too. Your arm, mine: who cares? The Bentley isn't enough. The front-loaded pension plan won't do. The place in the Dordogne barely answers the puzzle. The problem with honours is not in the alleged selling, actually, but in the belief that the thing purchased truly matters.

We could fix that. We could, citoyens, tell them to stop being so daft. We could turn around - in your street, in my town and in your village - and offer an honest expletive. "Off!" it might conclude.

My single point is so simple I barely need to say it again. If you laugh at someone who gets a knighthood, why don't you get angry? If you get angry, why don't you get even? Seriously.

Here's me, young journalist, being corrupted by the plods. Here's me, young and ambitious journalist, being intimidated by the roz. I decided not to tell lies: it's the way I was raised. I decided, finally, not to pick up the prizes offered, and there were many of those. Fool.

My point is that the political establishment will always need, the confirmation of corruption. "Join us," they say. What these types hate - and I include my old friend from the Branch in this - is dissent. Once tell them that you really won't play along and death follows, instantly. Back of the skull. In an alley.

I'm kidding. Honest. No, I'm truly kidding. Mainly. Mostly.

Everyone wants a gong. Every middle-aged man in a bad suit with a minor position in public life and a decent pension wants his British imperial certificate. Some of my esteemed colleagues would kill for it. Just kidding. The important point is Flaubert's, not mine.

"Honours dishonour," said the Frenchman, "and titles degrade." I have used the line a hundred times, and I cannot discover an improvement. This, possibly: what sort of dismal state do we inhabit when the lust for trash and baubles surpasses the desire to do honest work, now and again, for the greater good of all?

Can I have my knighthood now?