Meeting, at Windsor Castle, happens every two years and members are asked to wear lounge suits and their badges

Meeting, at Windsor Castle, happens every two years and members are asked to wear lounge suits and their badges

Order of Merit restricted to 24 members, but there are currently only 23 following death of sculptor Sir Anthony Caro

Order of Merit restricted to 24 members, but there are currently only 23 following death of sculptor Sir Anthony Caro


Widely respected as the most exclusive club in the world, Members of the Order of Merit were invited to lunch yesterday at Windsor Castle by the Queen.

The Order was founded by Edward VII in 1902 and members are chosen by the monarch - an honour awarded to individuals of great achievement in the fields of the arts, learning, literature and science.

It is restricted to 24 members - though there are currently only 23 following the death of sculptor Sir Anthony Caro.

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The world's most exclusive club: Members of the Order of Merit were invited to lunch yesterday at Windsor Castle by the Queen. The meeting happens once every two years

Past members have included Florence Nightingale (the first woman member), composers Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten, writers Thomas Hardy and T. S. Eliot, Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, Mother Teresa and Nelson Mandela.

The dress code for the meeting - held every two years - is lounge suits and the tiny Order: a badge of red-and-blue enamel that makes up an eight-pointed cross surmounted by the Imperial Crown.

In the centre of the badge, surrounded by a laurel wreath, are the words ‘For Merit’ in golden lettering. Members have the decorations on loan and, when they die, crosses go back to the Palace. A new member is then appointed to replace them.

Today, these are the men - and one woman - who comprise what has been described as ‘quite possibly, the most prestigious honour one can receive on planet Earth’...

1 Dr Martin Litchfield West

Dr West, 77, is one of our most distinguished classicists. Peers called him ‘on any reckoning, the most brilliant and productive Greek scholar of his generation, not just in the UK, but worldwide’.

An Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, in 2001 he acted as ‘Lord Mallard’ in a bizarre ritual in which he was carried around in a chair in search of a giant duck that, according to legend, flew out of the college foundations in 1437.

Prestigious: Members were asked to wear their badges of red-and-blue enamel when they were invited to lunch with the Queen

2 The Hon. John Howard

Howard, 75, is Australia’s most successful modern politician. Prime minister from 1996 until 2007, he won four general elections on the trot. His main electoral adviser in 1998 and 2001 was Lynton Crosby, nicknamed ‘the Wizard of Oz’ for his magic touch. The Wizard is now masterminding David Cameron’s election strategy.

3 The Rt. Hon. Jean Chrétien

Chrétien, 81, was Canada’s Liberal PM from 1993 until 2003. In 1995, he did the Queen a favour by helping stop Quebec becoming independent.

A less welcome memory will be how a Canadian DJ involved her in one an infamous hoax call by pretending to be Chrétien.

The prankster spoke to the monarch on-air for 15 minutes and elicited a promise for her to influence the Quebec referendum. The Queen fell for the ruse, with the Palace describing the incident as ‘irritating and regrettable’.

4 Sir Timothy Berners-Lee

The youngest at 59, he has arguably had more influence on the world than any other Member as inventor of the worldwide web. His achievement is the one that makes most people proud to call themselves British, according to a new survey.

5 Lord Eames

Robin Eames, 78, was Anglican Primate of All Ireland and Archbishop of Armagh from 1986 until 2006. Born in Belfast, he deftly negotiated the political, social and religious crises of the Troubles.

He was at his most prominent in 1996, when he refused to close Drumcree Church in Co. Armagh for the annual Orangemen’s March, for fear that it would increase sectarian tensions.

6 Lord Rees of Ludlow

Astronomer Royal for 20 years since 1995, Martin Rees, 72, once said aliens may be ‘staring us in the face’ in a form we humans are unable to recognise.

He was also president of the Royal Society and master of Trinity College, Cambridge (friend of Professor Stephen Hawking). Has his own asteroid named after him: ‘Asteroid 4587 Rees’.

7 Neil MacGregor

The 68-year-old received a tsunami of praise after his recently announced retirement as director of the British Museum — where he boosted visitor numbers with blockbuster shows such as Pompeii, China’s Terracotta Warriors and Shakespeare. One of the most flattering tributes was that he ‘was the man who made dumb objects speak’.

8 Sir Simon Rattle

The tousle-haired 60-year-old is Britain’s greatest conductor. In 2017, he will leave his job as principal conductor of the Berlin Philarmonic to become music director of the London Symphony Orchestra. Born in Liverpool, in the same road as John Lennon, he’s a devoted fan of Liverpool FC.

Thrice-married, his first wife was an American soprano; his second was the African-American novelist Candace Allen; and his third (and current) wife is the Czech mezzo soprano Magdalena Kozena, who is 18 years his junior.

Among the guests was Britain's greatest conductor Sir Simon Rattle (left) and Sir Timothy Berners-Lee (right), 59, inventor of the worldwide web

9 Professor Sir Magdi Yacoub

Egyptian-born Sir Magdi, 79, carried out Britain’s first heart and lung transplant at Harefield Hospital in 1983 and is thought to have performed more heart transplants than anyone else. He is professor of cardiothoracic surgery at Imperial College London.

He was inspired to take up his career after his aunt died of a heart condition while giving birth.

Last year he caused headlines by recommending that everyone over the age of 40 should take cholesterol-busting statins. The benefits of taking the controversial drugs ‘massively’ outweigh the risks and to not make them more widely available is ‘lunacy’, he said.

10 Lord Fellowes

Robert Fellowes, 73, isn’t a Member. He’s the Order’s secretary and registrar. The ultimate royal insider, he had to break his customary silence when, as the Queen’s Private Secretary, he was called to give evidence at his sister-in-law Diana’s inquest.

‘I can’t pretend I found it a comfortable experience being in a witness box for four hours,’ he said. ‘But the Princess’s death was a very, very great tragedy.’

11 Professor Sir Michael Howard

Sir Michael, 92, former Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, is Britain’s most distinguished military historian. Unlike many historians, he has seen real action: he was twice wounded and, in 1944, awarded the Military Cross for gallantry at Salerno during the Italian campaign. While crawling towards the enemy, his comrade trod on a landmine and was killed.

12 The Lord May of Oxford

Robert May, 79, is an Australian scientist and professor of zoology who has served as President of the Royal Society and Chief Scientific Adviser to the British Government. When he was made a crossbench peer in 2001, he wanted to be called ‘Baron May of Woollahra’ — a suburb of his native Sydney.

After the Australian Prime Minister’s Department objected, he settled for Baron May of Oxford, where he is a Fellow of Merton College.

He’s a passionate believer in the dangers of global warming, and has said that religious leaders should do more to persuade people to combat it. In this vein, in 2005 he attacked President Bush for ‘acting like a latter-day Nero who fiddles while the world burns because of global warming’.

Days later, he lambasted the British Government’s environmental record, labelling some of its policies as ‘gutless’ and saying it needed to do ‘a hell of a lot more’.

Her Majesty The Queen, who will be 89 on Tuesday, does not have the Order of Merit but her husband Prince Philip has been a member since he was 47

13 Professor Sir Roger Penrose

Sir Roger, 83, is a mathematical physicist, specialising in general relativity and cosmology.

In 1988, he shared the Wolf Prize for physics with Stephen Hawking, recognising their contribution to our understanding of the universe.

His uncle was the artist, Sir Roland Algernon Penrose, married to the war photographer, Lee Miller — best known for her pictures of the Nazi concentration camps, and for the photo of her in Hitler’s bath in Munich. Born in Colchester, he went to Cambridge University and in the Sixties calculated many of the basic elements of black holes. Five years ago, he wrote a book which put forward the theory that the Big Bang is an endlessly recurring event — a bit like yesterday’s Order of Merit lunch.

14 Sir Michael Francis Atiyah

Sir Michael, 85, is one of Britain’s greatest mathematicians. He has won several of the great maths and science prizes, including the Fields Medal, the Copley Medal and the Abel Prize.

He is an expert on topological K-theory — a branch of maths that uses algebra to investigate space. It’s not known whether Prince Philip brought up the tricky subject with Sir Michael yesterday — perhaps only after the Duke had had a glass or two of his favourite Double Diamond pale ale.

Though London-born, Atiyah grew up in Sudan, the son of a Lebanese father and Scottish mother, who was a minister’s daughter, before becoming a brilliant student at Manchester Grammar School and then Cambridge. He suffered a terrible loss in 2002 when his eldest son John died while on a walking holiday in the Pyrenees.

15 Prince Philip

The Queen’s husband, now 93, has been a Member of the Order since 1968, longer than any other living member. Aged 47 when he received the honour, he is the youngest person to become an OM.

16 HM The Queen

Her Majesty, who will be 89 on Tuesday, does not have the Order of Merit. But it’s thanks to her that everyone else in the picture has got one.

Guests, including playwright Sir Tom Stoppard (left) and architect Lord Foster of Thames Bank (right) were asked to wear lounge suits and the tiny Order badge

17 Lord Foster of Thames Bank

Norman Foster, 79, is one of Britain’s most famous architects. Among his buildings are the Great Court at the British Museum, the Reichstag renovation in Berlin, the new Wembley Stadium, and London’s Millennium Bridge, aka the infamous ‘wobbly bridge’.

Disappointingly for all thrill-seekers, the bridge - which was perfectly safe, structurally speaking - was later stabilised.

A grammar school boy from a Manchester suburb, Foster has a passion for aircraft and spent his national service in the RAF.

Having been knighted and then ennobled, he settled in Switzerland and five years ago gave up his seat in the Lords in order to maintain his non-domiciled status. Just the kind of thing, presumably, that the monarch might frown upon.

18 Sir Tom Stoppard

Britain’s greatest living playwright, Sir Tom, 77, is the author of Arcadia, Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead and, most recently, The Hard Problem. The Czech-born writer is renowned for the fiendish complexity of many of his plays.

A former journalist, Stoppard was once interviewed for a job by London Evening Standard editor, Charles Wintour.

‘I gather you’re interested in politics,’ said Wintour. ‘Who’s the Home Secretary?’

‘Look,’ said Stoppard, ‘I said I was interested, not obsessed.’

His personal life has been colourful, to say the least. In 1939, he left Czechoslovakia as a child refugee, fleeing the Nazis before eventually settling in Britain after the war.

He has been married three times, with his wives including the writer Miriam Stoppard (whom he left to begin a relationship with Felicity Kendal), and more recently socialite Sabrina Guinness, who he wed last year.

In 1977, the Queen hosted Members of the Order of Merit including J. B. Priestley, Earl Mountbatten of Burma, Lord Hinton of Bankside and Henry Moore

The Queen is pictured in 1987 with members of the Order of Merit at Buckingham Palace including author Graham Greene, engineer Sir Frank Whittle and musician Sir Yehudi Menuhin

Past members include Margaret Thatcher, Dame Joan Sutherland and Sir Andrew Huxley. They are pictured with the Queen and fellow members in 1997

19 Lord Rothschild

Jacob Rothschild, 78, heads the British wing of the great Rothschild banking clan. He left the family bank, NM Rothschild & Sons, in 1980 to run the Rothschild Investment Trust, now one of the biggest investment trusts in the country.

A keen philanthropist, he has generously endowed the National Gallery and Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum.

Educated at Eton and Oxford, he was once a business partner of the late Jimmy Goldsmith, as well as being a close friend of Princess Diana.

Of his four children, by far the most colourful is Nat, a billionaire financier who once admitted — during a court battle with the Mail — that he and Peter Mandelson had been flogged with birch twigs in a Russian sauna.

20 Baroness Boothroyd

Betty Boothroyd, 85, was the first female Speaker of the Commons in Parliament’s 700-year history.

When asked in her previous post as Deputy Speaker how she should be addressed, she said: ‘Call me Madam.’ Whereas Speakers normally shout ‘Order, order!’ during Prime Minister’s Questions, she preferred the simple catchphrase: ‘Right, time’s up!’

The Yorkshire lass had once worked for Britain’s most famous chorus line dancers, the Tiller Girls, before becoming a Labour MP. In recent years, she has attacked Tony Blair’s government for its ‘spin’, ‘sleaze’ and arrogance.

21 Sir David Attenborough

Sir David, 88, is Britain’s leading natural history broadcaster, world-famous for his nine Life series for the BBC. He is personally well-known to the Queen after producing her Royal Christmas Message from 1986 until 1991.

The sheer longevity of his career on television, which stretches back over 60 years, allied to his reputation as a brilliant and dedicated naturalist, means he has had a number of species of plants and animals named after him, from a flightless weevil beetle to the Attenborosaurus.

A grammar school boy who went to Cambridge, he has suffered his share of tragedy, however, first losing his wife of nearly 50 years — with whom he had two children — and last year his film director brother Richard.

Sir David Attenborough (pictured), Britain’s leading natural history broadcaster, is also part of what has been described as the most exclusive club in the world

Other members absent from the picture:

The Prince of Wales

Prince Charles, 66, has been a Member since 2002. He and his father are the only OMs who are also Knights of the Garter and the Thistle.

How does he fare intellectually in such elevated company? Just five O-levels and the 2:2 history degree he earned at Cambridge might give a clue.

David Hockney

Hockney, 77, has been one of Britain’s most popular artists since he spearheaded the Pop Art explosion in the early 1960s. Well into his eighth decade, he remains astonishingly prolific and original.

After many years living in Los Angeles, he has been spending more time recently in his native Yorkshire, painting the English countryside in all seasons. Hockney is a keen defender of smokers’ rights.

Yet another grammar school boy — in his case at Bradford — he studied at the Royal College of Art before he settled on the West Coast of America, and fell in love with the piercing light which features so strongly in many of his paintings.

Having settled back in Britain, Hockney was deeply saddened two years ago when his 23-year-old assistant, Dominic Elliott, died after drinking toilet cleaner during a drink and drugs binge at the artist’s Bridlington studio.

Sir Aaron Klug

Sir Aaron, 88, is a biophysicist and chemist, who won the 1982 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his development of crystallographic electron microscopy.

In the 1950s, he worked with Rosalind Franklin, the great British DNA pioneer. Despite his scientific genius, he says he’s getting more religious as he grows older.

The son of a saddler, he was raised in Durban in South Africa before coming to Britain to study at Cambridge. He married a trained dancer with whom he had two sons.

The Reverend Professor William Owen Chadwick

At 98, Professor Chadwick is the oldest Member.

The ecclesiastical historian was Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge from 1968 until 1983.