The New Year honeymoon is over. The Christmas decorations are finally down, earnest resolutions lay in pieces on the ground, and the people of Britain are making their way slowly back to work. But while the drink-sodden escapades of Hogmanay are yesteryear’s business, headaches abound in Westminster, as the political establishment is struck down by the Queen of all institutional hangovers.

The monarch’s New Year’s honours list is an inevitable source of controversy, and this one proved no different, with the inclusion of a certain Australian election mastermind going down rather bitterly with his recently vanquished opposition. A knighthood will be given to Lynton Crosby, the Conservative election guru, whose service to the Empire simply seems to have been doing his job in getting the Tories elected. The so-called ‘Wizard of Oz’, whose positivity and fairness in a political fight is nicely encapsulated by an election tactic of his known as ‘throwing a dead cat on the table’, may truly excel in the field of getting hard-core reactionaries elected throughout the Commonwealth (four times down under!), but it’s hard to see this as anything more than Cameron chucking Crosby a bonus for his good work.

All things considered, Crosby’s inclusion on the list is hardly surprising given the history of the honours system, and what’s more, is it really the place of Andy Burnham to say so, given his involvement with a government which literally sold peerages? The idea, as one SNP MP suggested, that the fiasco ‘devalues’ the institution of honours is absolute garbage. The monarch’s honours list is quite literally derived from a system of cynical aristocratic patronage, beginning with William I, who gave land to his allies in return for military service. After the medieval period, this transformed into a system of Royal Orders but remained a system of buying loyalty from the elite.

While at face value today’s honours list seems far less elitist, with over 70 per cent of the gongs going to people working outside of the public sector, it cannot go unnoticed that the list still serves the old function of elitist patronage. 70 per cent may be a majority but it certainly isn’t proportional. If you do your job properly in Swindon, you might get a bottle of wine at Christmas from your boss; in SW1 the equivalent appears to be an OBE. That this sleazy form of political compensation is something which is practised in both red and blue corners is exactly what demonstrates that it is a stale monarchical hangover, abused by party machines, and propped up by the smiling faces of brave cancer victims and Idris Elba.

In 2012, the Public Administration Select Committee suggested reforming the system so as only those who truly give “exceptional service above and beyond the call of duty” receive honours. Desirable as the notion may be, it demonstrates a basic misunderstanding of the system’s utility. While they make up its majority, the honours list does not exist to commend the good work of brave citizens. It is not a noble institution with a cronyism problem. It’s a cronyist institution which would not stand in modern Britain without the counterweight of all those stories of goodwill.

If there is hope to be had, then it is brought to us by Paul Flynn, a member of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee and long term opponent of the honours list, who welcomed the appointment of Crosby as he believed it would “drive the honours system into deeper disrepute” and that “the more it is abused, the more people will come to regard it as at best arbitrary, and at worst corrupt”.

Yet I worry that as long as there are good men and women in this country who are willing to run round the country for cancer, to fight Ebola in West Africa, and to feed breakfast to hungry children, the whole horrid system will continue to whirr away behind a curtain of goodness and charity. To churn out a twice-yearly list of good, bad and exceedingly ugly, the same cynical system it has always been – at best arbitrary, at worst corrupt.