Sickened by the prospect of Lynton Crosby's knighthood? You're not alone - but there is some good news

The last New Year’s resolution I made survived for two minutes. The promise in question was to think before speaking in the hope of avoiding monstrous faux pas. The vow was taken a few moments before midnight on 31 December 1979. At 12.02am on 1 January 1980 (for reasons fully explained on these pages before, but with which I would not dream of boring you again), I threw a garden spade over a shoulder and sang “Hi Ho, Hi Ho, it’s off to work we go” to a dwarf.

The memory of that catastrophe has precluded the offering of any further seasonal hostages to fortune. But 35 years is half a biblical life span and today I hereby resolve to try to follow the Monty Python boys’ dictum in 2016 by looking where possible, if not always, or even often, on the bright side of life.

So, to get in a bit of practice, we now turn to a pair of leaks from the New Year’s Honours list that presents as clear a choice between optimism and pessimism as one could imagine.

However wearily familiar you may be with politicians rewarding their servants and chums, the knighthood to Lynton Crosby causes a retch of nauseous despair. On his own, the creepy election savant from Australia excites the gastric juices into a foaming tide. Add the sight of an ever-cockier David Cameron abusing the system to honour a man for whom a reported pay package of £500,000 and the priceless publicity should have been adequate reward, and… But no, stomachs are delicate enough at this time of year without me dwelling on the regurgitative detail.

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Once, and not so long ago, I would have filled this space with bilious resentment about that knighthood. But in this newly embraced spirit of positivity, let us relegate Sir Lynton to a mere burp by taking the splendid anti-emetic offered by the Honours list. Barbara Windsor is to be a Dame Commander of the thriving entity known as the British Empire – and who can fail to be thrilled by that?

Windsor is the ideal counterbalance to Crosby. Where he and his dog-whistling expertise belong to the subterranean shade, Babs has devoted 60 of her 78 years to projecting a bespoke form of unrelenting sunniness. Where he is a dark import from a former possession across the seas, she is utterly and inviolably one of our own. Where Crosby saddled London (in the portly shape of Boris Johnson) with a patrician throwback politician, she is almost the last truly authentic voice of a working class London that has come to feel nostalgic to the point of Dickensian.

A glance at the roster of acting dames hints at the class system’s durability. Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Penelope Keith, Julie Andrews, Kristin Scott Thomas, Diana Rigg and Helen Mirren are all superb actors, and regardless of their backgrounds all speak the Queen’s English. Looking back at deceased dames of stage and screen, meanwhile, the only regional accent I can find belonged to Thora Hird. Babs would have been be-damed long ago, you suspect, if she only talked proper.

Instead, despite the elocution lessons her ambitious mother procured in the hope that she would become a receptionist, Babs cleaved to the Shoreditch brogue most recently heard from behind the bar of the Queen Victoria pub. Many know her best from EastEnders, but more fondly remember the Carry On Camping scene in which, exercising under his tutelage in a field, she pings her bra into the astounded chops of Kenneth Williams.

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Her first film role had been in The Belles of St Trinians, and whatever the later screen part, she continued to play the saucy, overgrown schoolgirl with the big knockers and the dirty laugh. She did this well and long enough almost entirely to occlude the serious acting talent which endeared her to Joan Littlewood, and won her major award nominations (a BAFTA and a Tony) on both sides of the Atlantic.

Being an optimist, I like to think she is being honoured for more than her career and charity work; that she is also being recognised for the richness and complexity of her life. By her own admission, for example, she was quite a shagger. Apart from the three husbands, her roll call of lovers includes one Bee Gee (Maurice); two Krays; George Best; fabled jazzer Ronnie Scott (along with a representative from both his trumpet and trombone sections); Carry On playmate Sid James, and many more. She even had a Crosby – though sadly it was a son of Bing’s, rather than Sir Lynton. Still, early doors there.

Spread over the years were five abortions, two divorces, and the distress of seeing her first husband, the Kray associate Ronnie Knight, banged up soon after taking his vows. She has suffered depression and illnesses (the debilitating Epstein-Barr virus among them), and come close to bankruptcy but never for a moment has she publicly allowed that bubbly Babs persona to slip.

A scarily bright child who took the grammar school scholarship exam a year early and scored the highest marks in the whole of north London, she was forced by her times and the presiding sexism of her industry to spend her pre-EastEnders battleaxe career playing the dumb blonde. If she resented it, she disguised it as well as she disguised her intellect.

Dame Babs has battled and endured, and in the process probably given more pleasure to the public than any other actress alive. She is, professionally and by all accounts personally, the very embodiment of always looking on the bright side of life, and those of us who lack the resolve salute her.