AND lo it finally came to pass — the commons gathered yesterday to “discuss” and vote as to whether fat-cat Top Shop supremo and tax-dodger extraordinaire Philip Green should be compelled to hand back his knighthood.

The conclave resulted from the “recent revelations” regarding Green’s business practices following the collapse of British Home Stores and the loss of thousands of jobs, not to mention the wholesale plundering of pension funds.

It has been argued, with a fair degree of understatement, that Green has shown himself to be unfit to operate a business and now stands accused of bringing the honours system into disrepute.

This was not exactly a new development though.

Green is an odious and egregious money-grubbing scumbag of the highest order, who destroyed his workers’ futures to line his own (or technically his wife’s) pockets.

But the pachyderm seeking to be inconspicuous by the coffee table here is not whether Green should be stripped of a gong but why he and numerous others received them in the first place.

The answer of course is money. Lots and lots of money.

The “honours” system is nothing of the kind. Rather it is an outrageous and antiquated sop to sycophants, usurers, back-stabbers and professional crooks.

As such can Green really be accused of bringing an already rotten system into disrespect? Or merely carrying on the age-old pantomime of blatantly partisan appointments based on the amount of filthy lucre the government du jour can pocket.

Stripping Green of his KBE may help salve a few consciences on the parliamentary benches for whom self-reproach is a novel concept, but so what?

Surely a more fitting punishment would be the seizure of the multimillion-pound yacht he appears to have used his ill-gotten gains to purchase, in part recompense for his massive non-payment of income tax.

It would save the nation a shedload of much-needed cash on what we are dubiously and repeatedly assured is the necessary purchase of a new toy for the Windsors.

Or — and what about this for a radical idea — handing the vessel over to the EU refugee rescue project to ensure fewer desperate families drown at sea.

That of course, is not going to happen. It is not how imperialism works.