New Years Honours in IT mixup

The Honours Committee have today had to reluctantly admit that many recipients of new years honours were the results of a test data mixup.

"The team always uses some names in their test data that are never going to get honours, you know, Mao Tse Tung, Genghis Khan, Jedward. This year, they had those and also added Hector Sants, Cherie Blair, Alan Budd and Margaret Beckett."

"It's designed so that if the test data run accidentally gets printed, at least the postman will stop them. Unfortunately, the postman couldn't quite put his finger on who they were, but thought they sounded plausible and let them go. Of course, having been sent, we didn't exactly want to own up to it and thought no-one would notice amongst the Olympic honours. We thought it was easier to let them slide".