COULD this be the moment when a meaningful campaign gets underway to try to reform Britain’s creaking honours system? If so, Glasgow-born Lynn Faulds Wood will have played a key part.

The former Watchdog TV presenter, who went on to become a prominent cancer campaigner, has caused a stir by rejected an MBE in the New Year’s honours list.

She tweeted: “Just turned down a New Year Honour - too tainted & we don't have an Empire. Let's clean up the Honours system!”

In subsequent tweets she added: “More of us should turn down honours until the system is reformed & fairer … I'd be a hypocrite to take an MBE when we don't have an Empire - need more 'honour' & fairness in Honours.”

Sunday Herald columnist Hardeep Singh Kohli tweeted her “Much respect.” Simon Kelner, former editor of The Independent, texted her: “You deserve the highest commendation. You’re a bloody hero.”

Faulds Wood continued her online critique of the honours system, tweeting: “Let’s #reformtheHonours with an independent review of how they should be reformed! Bet we don't get it!…Some donor recipients of knighthoods have paid more than £1m to political parties! High time to #reformtheHonours.”

The 68-year-old told radio station LBC: “If I was to investigate the Honours System on Watchdog now and I haven't done, I think I would find there's an awful lot of people getting honours, like I'm afraid the previous Prime Minister's resignation Honours List, which got roundly criticised by everybody for putting some ludicrous people on it.

"And that's my problem. First of all, I think it's kind of rude to other countries that we still regard ourselves as having an Empire in our system. I think that's disappointing and I would change that straight away if I could because it's a bit insulting.

"I also feel that people who give huge amounts of wonga to political parties should then not get an honour without it being obvious they've done something that cancels out that way over and above it.

"So I just have so many reservations about how open the system can be to abuse when you've got such wonderful wonderful people who deserve on honours.”

Faulds Wood was raised on Loch Lomondside. “I grew up in Scotland on the banks of Loch Lomond with a brother and two sisters,” she told Surrey Life magazine in 2009. “Amazingly, we all moved to Surrey and live within 50 minutes of each other. We often go for walks all together.”

She made her name on breakfast TV in the 1980s, followed by nearly 10 years on Watchdog - where she exposed crooks and conmen - presenting it for nearly a decade with her husband, John Stapleton.

But then she was diagnosed with advanced bowel cancer after what she describes as “a year of medical delay”.

In a frank personal video on the Bowel Cancer Information (BCI) website, which she co-founded, she acknowledges she is “lucky to be here, lucky because I survived advanced bowel cancer.”

She said she had noticed “a little tiny bit of bleeding” after visiting the toilet. She happened to be seeing her then GP for a cervical smear and mentioned it. “The doctor said, ‘It’s nothing to worry about at your age, it’s probably piles.’ He thought it was from my baby [Nick], that I’d had two years before. But I’d had a Caesarean, and they don’t give you piles.”

The bleeding continued and became slightly more noticeable, so she consulted the “wisest GP at the practice.” But she wasn’t worried, and neither was he, nor a specialist she later saw. In time, after she had a barium enema, an X-ray detected “a large cancer, shaped like an apple core, on my colon.” She underwent a major operation, which was a success. “Today,” she adds, “I’m cured, and I want to help as many people as possible to be as lucky as I’ve been.”

Faulds Wood’s BCI biog says she also helped bring about the world’s first evidence-based symptoms guidance for bowel cancer, helped establish formal training centres for doctors and nurses in endoscopy, and founded and ran the European Cancer Patient Coalition for eight years.

She has also chaired, at the invitation of the Department of Business Innovation & Skills, an independent review into UK consumer product recall, which reported 11 months ago.

In it she wrote: “On breakfast TV … followed by nearly 10 years presenting … Watchdog … I developed an interest in dangerous, unsafe products through a mailbag of thousands of letters a week. If we featured one story about a child dying in a drop-sided cot or a glass oven door literally exploding in a viewer’s kitchen, the next week our mail was full of similar stories.

“At that time, manufacturers and suppliers often said ‘safety doesn’t sell’. Looking back, it is amazing how many products with serious design flaws found their way into our homes and onto our roads. Indeed ‘potential deathtraps’ was how they became known through my BBC work in the 1980s and 90s. And too often that’s what they were.”

In 2009, with the scandal over MPs’ expenses at its height, several public figures offered to stand against MPs who had abused the system. Faulds Wood said she was considering running on an anti-sleaze ticket.

Last week the BBC reported that she did not know who had put her name forward for the honour, but she believed it was related to her disappointment that no action had been taken since the product-recall review was published.

Her principled opposition to the honours system comes as little surprise to those who have followed her career. #ReformtheHonours might yet take off.