Neither Downing Street nor the specialist arts and media committee that recommended the controversial author Salman Rushdie for a knighthood anticipated the honour would enrage some followers of Islam throughout the world.
Even the writers group Pen, which nominated Rushdie this year, as it has on numerous occasions in the past, anticipated the award would help heal the divisions between Islam and Rushdie and help foster better relations with Britain.
The arts and media committee, chaired by Lord Rothschild, is one of the numerous honours committees that help deliver a final list of nominees to Downing Street annually. Although the committee now looks like a politically naive gathering of literary individuals who failed miserably to grasp the controversy and rioting in parts of the Muslim world that would follow the announcement of Rushdie's honours, key members are far from being politically uninformed.
Andreas Whittam Smith, founder and former editor of The Independent, who has served on the British Board of Film Classification, said he and his colleagues were concerned only with the merits of Rushdie in relation to the award .
Another member of the committee is Jenny Abramsky, currently the BBC director of radio and music. Abramsky's career at the BBC has included periods as one of BBC s most senior news producers as well as heading the team which started Radio Five Live.
Politically naive is not a charge that could be levelled against Whittam Smith or Abramsky.
Whittam Smith said their opinion was then passed up the chain into the main honours committee to review other aspects, including the potential political fall-out, of the nomination.
As the Foreign Office is represented on the main committee, it would be expected that it would have appreciated the sensitivity of Rushdie's fame and the reaction that might follow in parts of the Muslim world like Pakistan.
The director of Pen in London, Jonathan Heawood, is said to have been shocked at the scale and venom of the protests worldwide which have attacked the Rushdie decision.
The Rushdie honours and its unanticipated reception worldwide in the Islamic world, has brought focus on the network of committees that help Britain award 3000 honours annually.
Some awards such as the Orders of the garter and Thistle are awarded as a special gift of the Queen. However it is the Prime Minister s List, which usually contains 1000 names , which provides the bulk of the honours total.
A main honours committee made up of the chairmen of the various specialist sub-committees reviews the selections, assesses any controversial recommendations or obvious omissions. The aim is for a balance in the final list.
It would have been at this stage that the sensitivity of the award to Rushdie would have been discussed. The chairman of the main committee is expected to deliver a list to Downing Street containing a report on the reason for each nomination. Had Rushdie been seen as a problem-nominee, it would have appeared on the report sent to Tony Blair.
Despite the weight of authority that comes from the main committee, the PM can make his own recommendations to the Queen. While the process is supposed to be confidential and free of political interference, The recent expos of the workings of the honours scrutiny committee, which led to the investigation by Scotland Yard into Labour s cash-for-honours scandal, showed that when the system goes wrong, it can have spectacular impact.
The fallout from the Rushdie nomination is different. The allegations is that no-one appeared to anticipate a difficulty, a sensitivity or a wider political impact beyond Britain. Yet his nomination was repeatedly evaluated and ended up being presented to the prime minister, who would have been expected to forecast difficulties.
The suggestion is that Rushdie had been at a high point in the nominations process before and this time a decision was taken not to back down.
In the view of one official, it is "Britain that decides who it honours, not a global jury, however inconvenient that may sometimes be".
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