“It’s beginning to get ridiculous,” says Louis Chilton in The Independent. What more does David Beckham have to do to bag a knighthood? Over the weekend, the former footballer was spotted waiting 13 hours “with the rest of the hoi polloi” to see the Queen, rather than flexing his celebrity status to skip the line. It’s just the latest development in his bid for national treasure status. Beckham has captained England’s football team, ferried the Olympic torch along the Thames, held meetings at Downing Street to tackle global food poverty, and even flown out to Afghanistan to “gladhand” with British troops. Short of “recolonising some small part of the Asian continent”, there’s little more he could do to endear himself to the establishment.
There are a few possible reasons why he’s still stuck on an OBE: historic alleged involvement in a tax avoidance scheme; the fact he “never came close to winning anything big with England”. And for much of his life, Beckham seemed at odds with “blue-blooded respectability”. He married a pop star, was covered in tattoos, and once sported a mohawk. But it’s hard to reconcile the hot-blooded “showboater” of two decades ago with “the besuited, low-key figure” in the queue to see the Queen. He is a man who has “done the graft and pressed all the right buttons”. Just give him the gong already.
🏅🙊 One possible reason for the omission, says the Upshot, could be the time Becks was caught branding the honours committee “unappreciative c***s” in leaked emails, and rejecting any other awards with a firm policy of: “Unless it’s a knighthood f*** off.”