New Year Honours: Lionesses take pride of place in new year honours

Captain Leah Williamson is among four of England’s Euro 2022-winning side to be named in the list, being made an OBE while her teammates Lucy Bronze, Beth Mead and Ellen White are all made MBEs.

The team’s Dutch head coach Sarina Wiegman also joins the party, after the Foreign Office made her an honorary CBE.

The youngest to be honoured is Dara McAnulty, 18, from Annalong, Co Down, who receives a BEM for his environmental work and work with people with autism spectrum disorder.

And the oldest is 100-year-old Peter Davies, from Bollington, in Cheshire, who is also be awarded a BEM for his work as a reading volunteer at Dean Valley Community Primary School.

Bronze, 31, told the PA news agency: “To be recognised for everything I’ve done throughout my career was a little bit surreal. It’s just something so different to football and something harder to compute.

“An MBE is obviously a huge honour and very special. The first person I told was my grandma.

“My grandma probably doesn’t understand many of the awards I’ve won in football but she adored the Queen, so I thought ‘this (MBE) is going to be her special thing’.”

Sir Grayson, the 62-year-old artist, writer and broadcaster who is known for his tapestries, ceramic works and cross-dressing, is knighted for services to the arts while fashion designer Dame Mary Quant is made a Companion of Honour.

Others to receive knighthoods include politicians who proved to be thorns in the side of Boris Johnson, including Conservative Julian Lewis, chairman of the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), and Labour’s Chris Bryant, who chairs the Commons Standards Committee.

There is also a prestigious honour for former Treasury permanent secretary Sir Tom Scholar, who becomes a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath having been summarily sacked by short-lived prime minister Liz Truss on her first day in office.

Elsewhere in sport, Olympic heptathlon gold medallist Denise Lewis, now the president of Commonwealth Games England, is made a dame, while in showbiz, actor Stephen Graham is made an OBE and comedian Frank Skinner an MBE.

Former royal aide Jason Knauf, who made a bullying complaint against the Duchess of Sussex, is among those appointed to the Royal Victorian Order (RVO), honours which are in the King’s gift and bestowed independently of Downing Street to people who have served the monarch or the royal family in a personal way.

Senior diplomats at the forefront of the UK’s response to the war in Ukraine have been included in the mix with damehoods for Melinda Simmons, ambassador in Kyiv, and Deborah Bronnert, ambassador in Moscow.

Others who worked on the UK’s response to Russia’s invasion have also been recognised, including Dr Paul Ransom, an emergency consultant, as well as Louenna Hood, a nanny from Cambridgeshire, who organised container loads of essentials to go directly to those fleeing the war-torn country.