New Year Honours 2014: Don't look for logic in our honours system Few of us monarchists would think, let alone say, that an ounce of heredity is worth a pound of merit. But that is the principle at the heart of the higher echelons of the system, particularly the Order of the Garter. This is the highest honour in the land and the most prestigious order of chivalry, in the Queen's personal gift - and is largely confined to the blue-blooded, who have barely had to break sweat for their gong. "What I like about the Order of the Garter," said Lord Melbourne, one of Queen Victoria's prime ministers, "is that there is no damned merit about it." Meanwhile, the MBE, at the other end of the scale, often goes to the people who have really had to excel to be recognised. This creates a certain imbalance. I'm sure the Duke of Westminster and Lord Sainsbury of Preston Candover are fitting members of the Order of the Garter. But there's hardly the same overwhelming moral merit as with the MBEs given to the extraordinarily forgiving Barry and Margaret Mizen, whose 16-year-old son Jimmy was murdered in London in 2008, and who have since set up the Jimmy Mizen Foundation to help young people do worthwhile things in their neighbourhood. Only two honours accurately attach a really high-value award to exceptional achievement: the Companionship of Honour and the Order of Merit. To be given the OM is to join a club of 24 people that is near-unique. Membership doesn't depend on class, blood, connections, sycophancy, clubbability or capacity for imbibing first-growth claret, but on pure merit alone: in the arts, academia, literature and science. Lord Melbourne would be horrified. The two new members of the Order of Merit this year - Sir Simon Rattle, the conductor, and Professor Sir Magdi Yacoub, the heart surgeon - have the kind of talent that is impressive on any account. The Companionship of Honour, awarded for achievements in the arts, literature, music, science, politics, industry or religion, is perhaps a rung or two lower than the OM. The new CH, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Master of the Queen's Music, will certainly rub shoulders with some rare talents, artist David Hockney and physicist Peter Higgs among them. But I'm not sure a couple of other members, Lord Patten and Sir Nicholas Serota, are really first-division material. In the end, that is one of the fascinations of the whole crazy game - its ability to provoke intense anger at the honouring of second-raters and the exclusion of first-raters. My personal obsession was always the lack of a knighthood for the late Ronald Searle, the greatest cartoonist of the 20th century, but you're bound to have your own disastrous omission from the honour roll. So by all means, boil with rage at our greatest living tennis player and most famous footballer remaining mere misters. But don't expect the honours system to behave like some dull, functional machine, instead of the amateurish, enchanting hodge-podge it has always been.