Not always known for his generosity of spirit, Piers Morgan made the most of Greta Thunberg failing to win the 100th Nobel Peace Prize. As soon as the news came through that the prize had been given to Abiy Ahmed, the prime minister of Ethiopia, for helping to end his country’s long-running conflict with neighbouring Eritrea, Mr Morgan tweeted: “How DARE they actually give it to someone who forged peace?!!!!”

In much of the media it has been said that Ms Thunberg has been “snubbed” by the five-member Nobel Peace Prize committee, comprising three politicians, a foreign policy academic and a lawyer, all Norwegians. The committee’s reasons for not giving the prize to Ms Thunberg or any of the other unsuccessful 300 candidates will not be known, and the shortlist will remain secret for 50 years. What Ms Thunberg would have done with the prize of 9 million Swedish kronors award (about £750,000) cannot be known.

Still, she was the bookie’s favourite, after a year in which she did more than anyone to raise the issue of climate change and the threat to life on earth. Although her environmental activism doesn’t fit that easily into the classic peacemaker model, there is a precedent – in 2007 the Nobel Peace Prize went jointly to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change”.

Ms Thunberg, still only 16, has yet plenty of time to win, but even if she doesn’t she will join some other distinguished names who missed out, including Mahatma Gandhi and Jimmy Carter, who had to wait 30 years after his historic Camp David Middle East accord to be recognised for his peacemaking work (though Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Menachem Begin of Israel did jointly win the 1979 prize).

By its very nature, the Nobel Peace Prize provokes controversy. When Barack Obama won the 2009 prize he’d been nominated after just 11 days in office and was still running two wars when he collected it. Some derided it as the “not George W Bush” prize. Topically enough, the European Union, as an entity, won the award in 2012, and the decision was again criticised by the Eurosceptics.

Other recipients, unanimously lauded at the time, look less impressive from a distance. Aung San Suu Kyi (1991), for example, and Henry Kissinger (1973) have not weathered well. The work of some still-respected and worthy recipients have not stood the test of time in other ways. All of those, for example, honoured for their peace-building in the Twenties and Thirties, statesmen such as Charles Dawes, Gustav Stresemann, Austen Chamberlain, Aristide Briand, Woodrow Wilson did not succeed in ending war. Most poignant was probably the writer Norman Angell, who won in 1933, the very year Hitler came to power. Angel’s bestselling book The Great Illusion posited the idea that war was such an economically ruinous enterprise that no nation would ever start one, and, if it did, the fighting would soon be over.

The Nobel Peace Prize does, though, retain its lustre, because so many of its winners did make a difference, and a lasting one. Outstanding recipients include the Red Cross (1917, 1944 and 1963); UN High Commission for Refugees (1954); Martin Luther King (1964); Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk (1993), Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres (1994), John Hume and David Trimble (1998), and Malala Yousafazi (2014).

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Since its foundation in 1901 the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to 107 individuals and 24 organisations, from every part of the world. In some years the winners seem obvious, in others less so and, in 19 years, no winner could be found who fulfilled the conditions set down in the industrial Alfred Nobel’s will: “The person who has done the most or best to advance fellowship among nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and the establishment and promotion of peace congresses.”