The news that Sen. Edward Kennedy is to be awarded an honorary knighthood adds to the battering that Britain is currently enduring. People no doubt feel sorry that the man has a brain tumor, but at the same time few Americans have ever been so disliked and resented by British public opinion. The honour of a knighthood to foreigners is itself quite rare. Kennedy is supposedly singled out for services to Britain. When President Obama was running for office, Kennedy’s endorsement of him seemed to matter, and plainly Prime Minister Gordon Brown calculated that on his recent visit he could please the White House by laying before it this piece of personal tribute. This is misconceived and humiliating.

The fate of Mary Jo Kopechne has not been forgotten. As for Kennedy’s services to Britain, they involved playing the Irish nationalist card and promoting the IRA throughout his career. Most probably he did not really believe in this cause but was grandstanding for the sake of the Irish vote in Massachusetts. The effect was to generate violence, cynicism, and falsehoods. The British, he said in 1971, were in Ulster the way the Americans were in Vietnam. Anticipating ethnic cleansing, he proposed that the Protestant majority there “should be given a decent opportunity to go back to Britain.” He made a particular point of welcoming Gerry Adams to the United States, lobbying to have him invited to the White House, fundraising and posing for photo-ops with that deceitful agent of nationalist violence. Nobody has a comparable record of trying to make Gerry Adams and the IRA seem respectable. That too has not been forgotten.

Compared to the major ills afflicting Britain, this knighthood is a minor issue, but nevertheless illustrates Brown’s special flair for rewarding those who don’t deserve it, and it is another step towards the terminal fate of him and his government.