Leading article: A knighthood, a novel debate and a furious reaction

This newspaper has always opposed the British honours system. Efforts by the present Prime Minister to open up the nomination process have had little effect, and towards the top end of the scale no perceptible effect at all. The system remains one of mutual backslapping, where the great and the good patronise their own and senior civil servants are rewarded just for having attained a particular grade. It is a pernicious anachronism that has defied modernisation and should have been abolished long ago.

That said, the system exists. And from one year to the next the lists say something not just about the system, but about our society. There are fashions in honours, as in much else, and no government totally resists the temptation to please the crowd. Every now and again, though, an award unleashes controversy beyond the finer points of whether someone "deserved" an OBE rather than an MBE. The knighthood awarded to the writer, Salman Rushdie, is a case in point. It is provoking one of the livelier ruckuses in recent years.

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Some of the objections relate to Rushdie's merits as a writer. There is a constituency that feels, genuinely, that his body of work is not "good enough" to warrant a knighthood. To this we would note that honours for cultural figures in general have often seemed few and far between, that novelists in particular seem under-represented, and that literary merit is, in part at least, subjective. There may be a broad consensus about truly great writers, but thereafter judgements differ.

As much caprice attaches to assessing literary worth as to proposing nominations for honours - up to and including the Nobel Prize. Rushdie's writing may not always reach the very top league, but his Midnight's Children is a masterly portrait of a world and a generation. As a pioneer of British-Asian writing, Rushdie paved the way for a flourishing genre. That he may not have set out to found a school of writing and has not made it his business to encourage aspiring writers - is neither here nor there. Nor, while we are on the subject, are the vagaries of his private life, nor his notoriously prickly character. He would not be the first gifted artist who was hard to live with. But there are two other objections to the award of a knighthood to Salman Rushdie that need to be addressed seriously. The first is his undisguised contempt for Britain and his refusal for many years to express any gratitude for the elaborate measures taken to protect him after Iran's fatwa over his Satanic Verses. Some feel this amounts to disloyalty and should exclude him from consideration for a British honour. We tend to think that, while traitors clearly disqualify themselves, the conferring of honours should pay no heed to degrees of patriotism.

The other is the - all too predictable - diplomatic fall-out. Rushdie's knighthood has prompted a protest from Iran, a carpeting for the British High Commissioner in Islamabad, and demonstrations on the streets of Pakistan. There must be fears that the protests could spread.

It is true that the decision to knight Salman Rushdie might have been incautious - especially if it reflected a false belief that the outcry over The Satanic Verses was over. We doubt that it was intended to be provocative; after all, two assassinations in the Netherlands and the furore over the Danish cartoons have shown that such issues can be as inflammatory now as they were then. Incautious or not, however, no government can allow anticipated hostility to dictate its actions - on something as parochial as honours, or as broad as foreign policy. As a cultural figure, Salman Rushdie, may or may not deserve his knighthood, but we would defend the Government's right to honour him, and Rushdie's right to accept.