What’s in a name?

Writing in the Daily Mail last week, following the death of the former Scotland football manager Craig Brown, the writer and satirist Craig Brown wrote a piece about namesakes and sharing his name with someone in the public eye.

See ‘Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated …’.

By coincidence, I was recently embroiled - not for the first time - in a mix up with my own near namesake, former minister The Rt Hon Sir Simon Clarke MP.

What happened was this.

I turned up for an event to which I had been invited and got past the initial security checkers, who were confirming the names of guests on their iPads, but when I went to collect my name badge the one they tried to give me read ‘The Rt Hon Sir Simon Clarke’.

As an aside, it has always surprised me that most people assume the name Clark is spelt with an ‘e’.

Surely the shortened version is the more obvious way to spell it because the ‘e’ is silent and adds nothing to the pronunciation?

Nevertheless, unless I correct them, or spell it out, that’s the default spelling the majority of people seem to adopt.

But I digress.

Bizarrely, it took several minutes before it was accepted that I wasn’t The Rt Hon Sir Simon Clarke and I was allowed to proceed, albeit without a badge of any description.

On reflection, though, I now think I should have accepted the badge they offered and worn it with pride, if only as an interesting social experiment.

Would people (those I didn’t know) react differently to someone identified as a ‘Sir’ and a ‘Rt Hon’?

Would they hang on my every word? More important, would they laugh at my jokes and wry observations?

Another thought occurred. What if I had taken the badge and put it in my pocket for future use?

Would I get a better table if I discreetly showed it to the maître d' in a swanky hotel? Would I be fast-tracked through airports and offered complimentary upgrades?

Eventually I would be outed as an imposter, but until then?

Anyway, this is the fourth or fifth time I’ve been confused for the member of Parliament for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (and former Chief Secretary to the Treasury).

The first time was when another MP sent a text that was clearly not intended for me. (I replied, pointing this out, and he laughed, nervously.)

Better still was the text from yet another MP requesting an urgent meeting, a meeting I naively turned up for.

I wasn’t embarrassed, but he was! (You can read about it here.)

I’ve also been contacted with requests to appear on TV and radio when it was not immediately apparent that they wanted Simon Clarke MP rather than the director of Forest.

The strange thing is that, although Simon Clark(e) is quite a common name, it’s only been an issue (for me) since my near namesake was elected to Parliament in 2017.

Before that, nothing.

The surname Clark(e) has been around for centuries, as you might expect, and Simon was a popular choice during the post war baby boom era, but the only Simon I knew growing up was a younger cousin on my mother’s side of the family so we didn’t share a surname.

There are nevertheless lots of Simon Clarks, if you look for them, including a horror novelist from Doncaster, a videomaker and science communicator from Bath, a freelance sports photographer, a former English professional footballer, and many more.

And that doesn’t include the many Simon Clarkes.

Talking of which, several years after I broke up with a girlfriend (or, more accurately, she broke up with me), she sent me a birthday card addressed to … Simon Clarke.

Ouch, that hurt.