Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Great Britain may have expected praise back home for being the first European leader to enjoy President Barack Obama’s hospitality at the White House and only the fifth British Prime Minister to earn the opportunity toi address Congress. Nevertheless, he should have reconsidered reading the fifth paragraph of that speech. Similar to a nervous entertainer at an especially raucous children’s party, Brown pulled his rabbit out of the hat nearly at the beginning of his act. Her Majesty – Britain’s Queen – had bestowed and honorary knighthood on “Sir Edward Kennedy,” he proclaimed.

Time Magazine reports that, “this was already a stretching point. The holders of honorary knighthoods – a motley crew that includes U2 lead singer Bono, his potty-mouthed countryman Bob Geldof, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and, until the honor’s revocation last year, Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe – are not allowed to style themselves “Sir,” a distinction reserved solely for subjects of Queen Liz. But where Brown really got himself in hot water was with his explanation of what the Massachusetts senator had done to deserve his quasi-ennoblement. Kennedy had contributed to improving American health care, boosting educational provisions around the world and, Brown told his congressional audience on March 4, “Northern Ireland is today at peace.”

Within 24 hours after the announcement, “the head of Northern Ireland’s police force revealed that the threat of terrorist attack presently stand at its highest level in seven years. Yet, that’s not why Kennedy’s honor has proved controversial. During the 30 years of the difficulties and in centuries that proceeded this evil period of history and even since some sort of stability has been accomplished in the region, the politics and status of Northern Ireland have always been capable of dividing neighbors and friends including politicians. “Edward Kennedy may never have said outwardly he supported the (Irish Republican terror group) IRA, but he certainly … was no friend of the UK,” said Lord Tebbitt, a stalwart of Margaret Thatcher’s government, whose wife was crippled by an IRA bomb attack in 1984. “This honor is wholly inappropriate on the basis of the sleaze attached to (Kennedy) after the crash at Chappaquiddick, let alone his support for nationalism in Northern Ireland.”

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