Honours committees ‘pressured by No 10 to reward Tory donors’

Former committee members tell Channel 4 News investigation of efforts made to persuade them to toe line

Current and former members of the government’s honours committees have said they faced pressure from Downing Street to reward Tory donors, and that if they failed to comply with requests they were informed their services were no longer required, an investigation by Channel 4 News has revealed.

Talking of one candidate, Sir Vernon Ellis, chair of the arts and media honours committee between 2012 and 2015, told the programme: “I felt that if he was given the honour, it would bring the honours into a bit of disrepute because people would say how can he possibly deserve this honour when in this other field there was so much kind of going on and noise and some of that was at his door, right or wrong.”