I CAN IMAGINE why one might covet a title, an honour, a gong of one’s own. I have long hankered to be Maltravers Herald of Arms Extraordinary, even though I cannot play the trumpet. I don’t want a peerage or a knighthood, but Master of the Bedchamber has a raunchy ring to it; or perhaps one of the more obscure titles from Britain’s heraldic past: a thane, say, or a seneschal.

What I cannot imagine, as the bungs-for-baubles affair rumbles on, is why anyone would ever want to buy a title.

A person ennobled for his or her achievements, or loyal work for the party, or mere toadying, may bask in the belief (however mistaken) that the title has been earned, that the supposed deference it brings is merited. But those who have merely shelled out for a title must know, in their hearts, that it evokes no more esteem in others than any other expensive luxury: the ownership of a personalised number-plate, say, or Chelsea Football Club.

The self-bought title is the ultimate badge of self-delusion: Lord Loadsamoney and Baroness Backhander may believe that by buying into the ermine they are sharing in a great and noble past. But the dead stoat must surely rest uncomfortably on the shoulders of anyone who knows that it is, in effect, merely an extremely expensive item of designer clothing, purchased just as surely as if it had been picked up in the high street.

Yet the British have always bought titles and, if the current allegations of cash for peerages are substantiated, continue to do so at inflated prices. This is an odd reflection on modern Britain. We are no longer a class- ridden, cap-doffing society, ready to cringe before a title. Yet the handful of very rich, very vain people who are prepared to buy these things plainly believe that we still are.

There is a vast gulf between the peerage bestowed for distinction and the one bought off the peg: only the cash-bought peer believes the public cannot tell the difference. These people think they are purchasing respect, whereas they are mostly buying mockery.

“I suppose that peerage cost the old devil a deuce of a sum,” Bingo Little remarks to Bertie Wooster in The Inimitable Jeeves, after his uncle, wealthy proprietor of Little’s Liniment (“It Limbers up the Legs”) is elevated to the House of Lords. “Even baronetcies have gone up frightfully these days.”

James I invented baronetcies as a quick fundraiser and sold them for £1,000 a pop, no questions asked. Under Lloyd George a viscountcy might set you back £120,000, but a knighthood was yours for £10,000, and an OBE was a snip at £100, an ideal Christmas present. Between 1917 and 1922, some 25,000 OBEs were flogged.

A recent study by the Bow Group found that a person who has donated money to the Labour Party is 7,000 times more likely to get a peerage than a member of the public who has not. The right-of-centre think-tank calculated the going rate for a peerage at about £1 million.

The Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act, 1925, is unequivocal. “Any person who accepts or agrees to accept or attempts to obtain from any person for himself or another the grant of a dignity or title of honour is guilty of a misdemeanour.”

But all parties have always favoured selling titles to fill the coffers, so long as the market can be kept secret, and thus buoyant. Lloyd George confided to a Tory friend: “You and I know that the sale of honours is the cleanest way of raising money for a political party . . . The worst of it is that you cannot defend it in public.”

Therefore, let us make the sale of honours public, as a tax on vanity. Let us have a fully elected upper chamber, which should be the only basis for legislative power anyway, put a cap on party donations, and sell a handful of titles to the rich and vainglorious at extortionate prices to make up the shortfall in party funding.

Alternatively, we could throw the market wide open and sell a whole range of titles as a form of voluntary taxation, in the established British tradition. James I made his new title compulsory for the rich, but Charles I rather debased the currency by selling too many and by the 1640s you could pick up a bargain baronetcy for £400. Charles II even sent salesmen around the country to sell baronetcies door to door.

We could keep the old titles, but add some fresh ones. The French have lots of honours for all sorts of activities, including a fetching green medal called the Order of Agricultural Merit, or “the Leek”, for services to allotments, and another reserved for postmen: the Postal Order.

If a peerage were on sale for £1 million with real ermine trim, then a lesser title, say squire, would bring the right to wear a ferret for £500, a thane could don a squirrel for £100, and so on. The people who buy these titles could then wear them to cow bank managers, book tables in snobbish restaurants, impress Americans and irritate Jeffrey Archer. There would surely be a lucrative export market.

Maundy Gregory, Lloyd George’s title-broker, is the only person ever convicted of selling honours in Britain. A repulsive man but an astute student of the baser parts of human nature, Gregory continued to sell honours after his downfall, hawking foreign titles, bogus decorations and even papal honours from his Mayfair club.

People in need of social reassurance and validation will always seek a handle, even though it maybe be meaningless, ridiculous and degrading to those who win honour on merit.

Yet alongside the national hunger for honours, is another, more attractive tradition of rejecting titles: Gladstone was Mr to his last breath; Churchill rejected the offer of a hereditary dukedom; and I shall never be Maltravers Herald of Arms Extraordinary — unless, of course, the title turns up on eBay.

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