BRITAIN:He may be renowned for an instinctive austerity, but the first new year honours list of Gordon Brown's premiership is scattered with a handful of stardust, as a chat show host, numerous actors and Britain's favourite diminutive pop singer, Kylie Minogue, receive accolades.
Minogue, who battled back from cancer this year, is to receive an OBE, while Michael Parkinson, who retired from his sofa last week, will be knighted.
Britain's grandest theatrical knight, Sir Ian McKellen, becomes a Companion of Honour for "services to drama and equality".
Jacqueline Wilson, the children's author who has sold 20 million books in Britain alone, becomes a dame.
The prime minister ordered the labyrinth of Whitehall committees which vet nominations from both the public and officialdom to concentrate on people who serve their communities in schools, hospitals and the voluntary sector. Downing Street let it be known that the vast majority of the 972 people honoured today - 599 of them at the modest MBE level - are what Brown calls "the often unsung heroes of our cities, towns and villages".
There are faint echoes of the Blair years with the award of the Order of the Bath to Tom Kelly, the prime minister's official spokesman, who admitted describing David Kelly, the scientist at the centre of the "dodgy dossier" furore, as being "something of a Walter Mitty character".
The most high-profile recipients come from the worlds of entertainment, the arts and retailing. There are no peerages, but knighthoods go to Stuart Rose, the chief executive of Marks & Spencer, who has led a revival in the retailer's fortunes, and Nicholas Kenyon, the managing director of the Barbican, who directed the BBC Proms seasons for 12 years.
Charles Saumarez Smith, who left the National Gallery after a power struggle and crossed Piccadilly to the Royal Academy, where he is secretary and chief executive, is made a CBE. Other new OBEs include the actor Richard Griffiths, who played Hector in the film of The History Boys, and Trevor Romeo, also known as Jazzie B, the creator of the Soul II Soul music empire.
Des Lynam, the broadcaster who anchored Match of the Day for years, said his OBE was "a splendid surprise". Olympic medallist Brendan Foster becomes a CBE, as do the veteran actor Leslie Phillips and Julie Walters, who is working on a big-screen adaptation of the hit musical Mamma Mia, the novelist Hanif Kureishi and jazz pianist Stan Tracey.
In science, Dolly the Sheep's creator Ian Wilmut will be knighted for "revolutionising" biology through the cloning technique. Cambridge-based cancer researchers Prof Bruce Ponder and Prof Li Ka Shing are to be knighted.