So you go swanking down the pub with your little lapel badge boasting that you’ve had a gong, and in the current climate of murky suspicion the first question can be none other than: “How much did that cost you, then?” The correct, and in most cases honest, answer will be fifteen quid.

Sir Hayden Phillips and the Select Committee on Public Administration recommended in recent reports that the great and the good should have something more discreet to wear on their everyday clothes than the big shiny medal on the end of a ribbon that the Queen hands them at their investiture. Provided they pay for it.

So now an estimated 120,000 living members of the Order of the British Empire in its many — and sometimes class-based — gradations will be entitled to wear the buttonhole.

Most of them won’t. We secretly like honours; only a minority refuse the offer on the ground of conscientious objection, and most who accept love their day out at Buckingham Palace. But we don’t flaunt them; we put them away in a drawer, unless we are one of that class that attends sufficient boiled-shirt occasions for the full regalia to be worn.

It is an attitude that Americans, in particular, will never understand. Those US citizens awarded honorary British decorations tend to regard them as the cat’s pyjamas.

We don’t wear much on our lapels beyond the annual Remembrance poppy, a universal symbol that unites rather than distinguishes. Every current holder of the French Légion d’honneur, of which there are legions, is entitled to wear a discreet rosette, and many do.

But even after 217 republican years the French still cannot survive without a good dose of snobbery. British snobbery is codified in detail; we don’t have to make a song and dance, or even a lapel badge, out of it.

So who among our own will sport this little trinket? Zara Phillips, who was appointed MBE on the back of a horse rather than on the back of her family connections, might well pin it to her hacking jacket.

Rod Stewart, newly appointed CBE, will probably join those pop knights Sir Paul, Sir Elton, Sir Mick, (Sir) Bob and Sir Cliff in not wearing it on stage. Hold on: we might just strike Sir Cliff from that list.

Steve Gerrard may not find room on his Liverpool shirt among all the sponsors’ slogans — and his club is sprung from a city not notably monarchist — but the team’s potential new owners, the Maktoums of Dubai, could insist on it as a further badge of honour, even although the club are already replete with silverware.

Sir Gus O’Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary, has said that the new emblems are a visible sign of a person’s accomplishments. “I hope that many will choose to wear them with pride. I also believe that this is an important step in increasing overall awareness and understanding of the Honours system.”

Come on then, Gus: bet you don’t wear your KB insignia to Cabinet meetings.

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