Insiders Say Rudy Giuliani’s Knighthood Should Be Stripped

LONDON—Shortly after receiving his honorary knighthood at Buckingham Palace on Feb. 13, 2002, Rudy Giuliani was asked by a reporter what Queen Elizabeth II had said to him during the ceremony. Giuliani—recently transfigured into America’s Mayor for his leadership after the 9/11 terror attacks—said the British monarch had conveyed sympathy. “She said it must have been hard and awful,” he said at the time. “She said that she had watched a lot of what happened and what I had done, and that she wanted to express her admiration.” Giuliani said he told the queen that he was receiving one of the U.K.’s highest honors “on behalf of not myself, but all of the police officers and firefighters and rescue workers and heroic people in New York.”

Since that distinguished day, arguably the high-water mark of Giuliani’s international reputation, things have changed. His latest public disgrace came this month, when a jury ordered him to pay $148 million to a pair of former election workers whom Giuliani defamed with lies of election fraud. But that’s just one of many humiliations in recent years. The prosecutor who was once the scourge of the mob was more recently having his own mugshot taken as he was booked on racketeering charges. The politician who was once popular enough to win elections of his own was more recently giving unhinged news conferences—one at a landscaping business next to a sex shop, another at which he appeared to be melting—ranting about the 2020 election being stolen from Donald Trump. And the statesman who was once honored by the British sovereign was more recently made a laughing stock by a British comedian, who filmed him putting his hands down his pants.

Nevertheless, Giuliani’s honorary knighthood remains. Because he isn’t a British citizen, he’s never been able to style himself “Sir Rudy,” but he can use the post-nominal letters “KBE” for “Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire”—the highest honor the British sovereign can give to a foreigner. Now, almost 22 years later, the honor could be taken away from him.

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Giuliani is certainly no stranger to being stripped of accolades. Schools including Middlebury College and Drexel University revoked honorary degrees awarded to him, respectively citing his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and the suspension of his law license over his bogus stolen election claims. The University of Rhode Island, explaining why it too was revoking an honorary degree given to Giuliani, said the former mayor had gone as far as encouraging “domestic terrorist behavior” on the day of the Capitol riot.

But in Britain, losing a knighthood—or an honor of any kind, for that matter—is rare. According to government figures, there were just 12 “forfeitures” between 2019 and 2022 (all of which came in 2020). Losing an honorary knighthood, those lofty awards given to non-Brits, is a feat so rare that, to achieve it, you’ve typically got to have offended the U.K. so severely that they’re willing to risk any diplomatic fallout that could potentially arise from your honor being stripped.

It happened in 2008, for example, to Robert Mugabe as a symbolic gesture of outrage over human rights abuses in Zimbabwe. The Romanian despot Nicolae Ceauşescu reportedly had his honorary knighthood revoked the day before he was executed by a firing squad in 1989, while Benito Mussolini had the dubious of distinction of becoming the first Italian to receive an honorary knighthood and then being the first to lose it over his cozying up to Nazi Germany and declaring war on Britain.

Needless to say, this is an exclusive club of which you do not want to become a member.

When Brits have their honors revoked, it works like this. An ad hoc body known as the Forfeiture Committee is convened by the Cabinet Office, the government department responsible for the administration of the honors system, and the committee will consider recommendations for removals. In turn, the committee will give its recommendations for forfeitures through the prime minister to the monarch, who has the final say—the idea being that the sovereign awards the honor, and ultimately has the power to take it away.

The kind of behavior that the British government cites as grounds for forfeiture is where things get squirrely for Giuliani. The Cabinet Office on one site concerning the withdrawal of honors says that the Forfeiture Committee will “automatically” consider cases in certain circumstances. One of those cases is a situation in which the recipient of an honor has been found guilty of a criminal offense and sentenced to more than three months in prison. Another is when the recipient has been “censured or struck off” by a regulator or professional body, especially those that are “directly relevant” to the granting of the honor.

“There is an expectation that those who receive an [honor] are, and will continue to be, good citizens and role models,” the site reads, repeatedly emphasizing that forfeiture is for recipients who have brought the British honors system “into disrepute.”

That Giuliani is currently facing disbarment is arguably not “directly relevant” to the reasons for his being given the knighthood in the first place. And similarly he has never been convicted of a crime, let alone sentenced to more than three months behind bars.

It’s not impossible that that could change, however. His charge of violating Georgia’s RICO Act for allegedly being involved in a conspiracy to overturn the result of the 2020 election alone carries a possible sentence of between five and 20 years imprisonment. He has pleaded not guilty to all 13 charges filed against him in the case.

Asked by The Daily Beast if the Forfeiture Committee would automatically consider stripping Giuliani of his knighthood in the event that he’s sentenced to more than three months in prison, or if the committee would consider him to have brought the honors system into disrepute in the event of any kind of criminal conviction, a Cabinet Office spokesperson said only: “It would be inappropriate to comment on any individual [honors] recipient.”

In reality, stripping Giuliani of his honor would be a fraught question for the U.K.

A former senior official in the British civil service who was intimately involved in the work of administering honors says that while there’s “quite a firm criteria for revoking an honor” of a British citizen, it’s more complex with foreigners. “It’s a diplomatic thing,” the official said. Would it be in Britain’s best interests, for example, for it to revoke Giuliani’s honor if Trump is then re-elected?

Still, when asked if they thought Giuliani should lose his honor in the event of his conviction, the official told The Daily Beast: “Yes, I do, but I don’t think it would follow automatically.”

Consider the case of former New York Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik. On Oct. 15, 2001, it was announced at a news conference at New York City Hall that in addition to Giuliani being given an honorary knighthood, slightly less prestigious British honors called CBEs were being awarded to both Kerik and then-Fire Commissioner Thomas Van Essen. (As an aside, on the subject of losing honor, the person who actually announced at the news conference that Giuliani was set to receive his award “for his outstanding help and support to the bereaved British families in New York” was none other than Prince Andrew.)

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Kerik was later convicted on felony charges including tax fraud and sentenced to four years in prison, so how come—even if he was ultimately pardoned by Trump—Kerik wasn’t stripped of his honor? “I should think the most likely explanation,” the British official said, “is nobody noticed.”

They went on to explain that there might be two cases, realistically, in which foreigners could lose honorary knighthoods, specifically. One of them, clearly, is when the recipient has become an enemy of Britain. “Well that wouldn’t be true of Giuliani,” the official said. “But it would be someone who so disgraced himself we don’t think that, you know, he should continue to have one of our honors.”

Toby Harper, an associate professor at Arizona State University who wrote a book about the history of the British honors system in the 2oth century, says that there also needs to be a substantial desire for forfeiture to happen. “It’s not simply enough that Giuliani be convicted of a crime, it’s also that there needs to be political will to get the forfeiture process started,” Harper tells The Daily Beast.

Politics certainly do seem to play a significant role when it comes to foreigners receiving honors. In November, during a state visit of South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol to the U.K., King Charles took the time to give MBEs to members of the K-pop band Blackpink “on the recommendation” of the British government. Political will also appears to be involved when foreigners are having their honors taken away. In September 2020, Harvey Weinstein was stripped of an honorary CBE he’d been given 16 years earlier—for his contributions to the British movie business—in the wake of his rape conviction. Multiple British lawmakers had lobbied for years for his honor to be taken away before it actually happened.

It’s unclear if any British lawmakers would make a similar stand about Giuliani. “I think this ultimately boils down to a political question,” Harper said. “Does the British government have the political will to endorse, I guess, the ways in which American society or the American justice system has censured Giuliani? If it was my choice, if I was in the Cabinet Office right now, I would be pushing for it, especially if he’s convicted.”

For those who believe the entire British honors system is in need of an overhaul, Giuliani’s knighthood is merely one of many honors that may require reconsideration. Although the awarding of honors has been the source of various scandals in Britain for at least a century, the genre has had several high-profile new entries in recent years as the U.K.’s apparently revolving door of prime ministers have sought to reward personal friends and political allies—including with controversial knighthoods and peerages in the House of Lords.

“The honors awarded by prime ministers often are just a form of cronyism,” Tom Brake tells The Daily Beast. Brake is a former British member of parliament who now serves as the director of Unlock Democracy, an organization which campaigns for democratic reforms in the U.K. In Giuliani’s case, Brake believes it was “perfectly appropriate” for the award to have been given at the time. “Unfortunately his actions since—and particularly in the last couple of years under Trump—now make him completely ineligible for that honor,” Brake says, adding that he believes Giuliani should forfeit his honor even if he’s not sentenced to more than three months in prison. “Anyone who tries to overturn a legitimate election result I think should not be worthy of an honor and a knighthood under the British honors system,” Brake says.

Prof Harper agrees that it made sense for Britain to honor Giuliani as a symbol, like Giuliani himself told the queen, on behalf of New York’s emergency services who responded to the horror of the 9/11 attacks. “The heroism of those people hasn’t soured in the intervening 20 years,” Harper says, “But Giuliani’s reputation—and maybe some of the politics around that—has soured a lot.”

A spokesperson for Giuliani did not respond to requests for comment.