FOR one of today’s new knights, the honour comes despite his qualities having being embarrassingly disparaged in leaked minutes from the honours committee.

John Taylor, the director-general of the Research Councils, who joined Whitehall from the computer industry, was described as “very promising when he moved from Hewlett-Packard, but that promise had not been altogether fulfilled” in the minutes of a meeting of top civil servants in October to consider the list. The minutes were leaked to The Sunday Times.

A knighthood also goes to Professor John Enderby, of the University of Bristol, a candidate the committee saw as a rival to Dr Taylor for the available scientific gongs. In the event, both get them.

But there is no honour for Professor Colin Blakemore, chief executive of the Medical Research Council, despite his having been nominated four times by the specialist committee that recommends science and technology honours.

The leaked minutes indicated that Professor Blakemore’s robust defence of the need for animal experiments in medical research has made him persona non grata with the honours committee, despite his doing no more than defend what the Government says is its policy.

He blames “personal whim, political expediency, perhaps blackballing by individuals” for his exclusion. The Science Minister, Lord Sainsbury of Turville, has blamed civil servants for the muddle.

No such controversy attaches to the knighthood for Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the world wide web. He invented in his spare time the system that allows anyone with a computer and browser to use the internet, and famously gave it away for free.

The modest, publicity-shy physicist, now 48, points out that he did not invent the internet itself and insists that he is “quite an ordinary person”.

He said yesterday: “I’m very honoured, although it still feels strange. I feel like quite an ordinary person and so the good news is that it does happen to ordinary people who work on things that happen to work out, like the web.”

Educated at the Emanuel School in Wandsworth and Queen’s College, Oxford, he developed the world wide web when working at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, near Geneva.

Unlike other internet pioneers he has not made a fortune and earns a modest academic salary as the head of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston.

He married Nancy Carlson, an American software analyst, in 1990, and they have two children. He was previously awarded an OBE and was hailed by Time magazine as one of the top 20 thinkers of the 20th century.

He said of his knighthood: “It’s a great honour. It’s a link to Britain for me, which is nice. Links with Britain are very important to me. You always see Buckingham Palace through the railings. It’s about as much of a shock to go through the railings as it is to go through the mirror like Alice in Wonderland.

“You always assume that life as you know it stops at the railings of Buckingham Palace.”

He had been unaware of the controversy over the honours system. “What is interesting about the British system is the way that modern values of democracy and transparency have been connected with ancient tradition, and attempts to keep that tradition and its roots alive.

“It is a good idea to review the process by which you make decisions, but not to change them too dramatically, but incrementally.”

The diet and exercise guru Rosemary Conley becomes a CBE. She has turned a low-fat diet plan she devised in 1986 into a business empire, running a network of franchised diet and fitness clubs that teach more than 2,000 weekly classes to 80,000 people. Her books, beginning with the Complete Hip and Thigh Diet, have sold nearly eight million copies around the world.

Professional nutritionists find little fault with the Conley diet, because it follows conventional dietary principles and also emphasises exercise. The Conley approach scored highly in the BBC Diet Trials series, with a higher proportion of people reaching target weights than on any other diets.

Rabbi Julia Neuberger, the retiring chief executive of the King’s Fund, becomes a Dame. A writer, broadcaster and tireless committee-woman, she has had six years at the top of the King’s Fund and has seen many of its ideas translated into government policy. The latest — still some way from realisation — is the idea of liberating the NHS from political control, removing from ministers the decisions over where money is spent. Instead an independent body should be created, she says, accountable to Parliament only, which would allocate NHS spending.

John Collinge, one of the UK’s leading experts on variant CJD, becomes a CBE. Working at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, Professor Collinge has led a team seeking to understand how diseases such as CJD and BSE (“mad cow” disease) function.

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