Today’s the day when years of wistful trawling through the fine print of the Queen’s Birthday Honours (you’ve done it too, haven’t you?) happily pay off for Salman Rushdie, Ian Botham and Barry Humphries. For today they, along with crowds of men and women whose names will be as familiar to most people as Fermat’s Last Theorem, have a few extra letters to add as garnish to their signatures.

The author of The Satanic Verses, who spent years living under a death threat after an Iranian fatwa, becomes Sir Salman Rushdie (surely only a churl would quote to Sir Salman Arnold Bennett’s quip that: “Literature is always a good card to play for honours. It makes people think that Cabinet ministers are educated”). For services to cricket and charity (and passage into a more sedate middle age?) one of England’s greats awakes as Sir Ian Botham. Barry Humphries, for services to humour and cross-dressing, is appointed CBE (what would Dame Edna say?). Oleg Gordievsky, the Soviet double agent, becomes Oleg Gordievsky ex-KGB, CMG, having been appointed to the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George, the same honour as was held by James Bond.

But alongside the many starry names are those of people such as Denis and Ann Holder, who have fostered more than 100 children. They are appointed MBE.

Too much fuss, perhaps, is still made of honours. And perhaps, also, too little. As long as they are not in the pocket of politicians, deployed for patronage, or sold for cash, they can add to the gaiety of the nation, like sprinkles on a fairy cake.

You may have to be important to be given a grand honour, but you have to think yourself even more important to make a public fuss about rejecting one.

Handed a baronetcy, Denis Thatcher said thanks, but was as thrilled to have just become a member of Sunningdale Golf Club. Anyway, the Oxford don Maurice Bowra advised always accepting an honour “because of the pain it brings your enemies”. So some use in them yet.