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His Majesty The King has been graciously pleased to appoint three new Companions to the Order of the Garter. The Companions are:

The Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield, to be a Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter.

The Lord O’Donnell, GCB to be a Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter.

The Right Honourable The Lord Burnett of Maldon, to be a Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter.

The Order of the Garter is the oldest and most senior Order of Chivalry in Britain. Each year, it is celebrated with a procession and service in the grounds of Windsor Castle.

The appointment of the Knights and Ladies of the Garter is in the King’s gift (i.e. without Prime Ministerial advice). Appointments to the Order of the Garter are therefore in the same category as the Order of the Thistle, the Order of Merit and the Royal Victorian Order which are also in the King’s gift.

Today's announcement brings the number of companions to 23 (out of a maximum of 24).
This year’s Garter Service will take place this Summer at St. George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle.
The appointments are effective from today – Thursday, 23rd April 2026.

The Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield

Lord Hennessy is an academic and historian specialising in the history of government. He has served as Attlee Professor of Contemporary British History at Queen Mary University of London since 2000.

Lord Hennessy was born in North London and is of Catholic Irish heritage on his father’s side. He was educated at grammar school in Stroud after the family moved to Gloucestershire. He studied at St. John’s College, Cambridge. Lord Hennessy was awarded a Kennedy Memorial Scholarship to Harvard University in 1971-72.

Lord Hennessy started his career in journalism with The Times Higher Education Supplement. He went on to writer leaders for The Times, for which he was also Whitehall correspondent. Lord Hennessy later worked for the Financial Times and the Economist, before becoming a regular presenter of the BBC Radio 4 programme Analysis. He went on to present the Radio 4 programme Reflections, for which he interviewed Shirley Williams, Jack Straw, Norman Tebbit and Neil Kinnock, among others.
Lord Hennessy co-founded the Institute of Contemporary British History in 1986. His analysis of post-war Britain in Never Again: Britain 1945-1951 won the Duff Cooper Prize in 1992 and the NCR Book Award in 1993. His study of Britain in the 1950s won the 2007 Orwell Prize for political writing. Lord Hennessy was elevated as a crossbench life peer in 2010.

Lord Hennessy is married to Enid, with whom he has two daughters.

The Lord O’Donnell, GCB

Lord O’Donnell served as Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service between 2005 and 2011. He was born in South London and educated at Salesian College, Battersea, the University of Warwick, at which he read Economics, and Nuffield College, Oxford. He worked as a lecturer in economics at the University of Glasgow before joining HM Treasury in 1979.

In 1985 Lord O’Donnell joined the British Embassy in Washington, where he served as First Secretary of the Economics Division for four years. He later served as Press Secretary to both the Chancellor and Prime Minister. Lord O’Donnell returned to Washington in the late 1990s as U.K. director on the boards of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Since leaving the Civil Service in 2011, Lord O’Donnell has served as Chair of Frontier Economics, professor in practice at the London School of Economics and honorary fellow of the British Academy. He is also board member of worldwide wellbeing movement and All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, president of the Institute of Fiscal affairs and a trustee of The Economist. He was appointed Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath in 2011 and created a crossbench Life Peer in 2012.

Lord O’Donnell is married to Melanie, with whom he has a daughter.

The Right Honourable The Lord Burnett of Maldon

Lord Burnett served as Lord Chief Justice between 2017 and 2023. He studied jurisprudence at Pembroke College, Oxford, where he became an honorary fellow in 2008. He was called to the bar at Middle Temple in 1980 and appointed Queen's Counsel in 1998.

Lord Burnett practised civil, public and administrative law and was appointed to the High Court in 2008 and to the Court of Appeal in 2014 with responsibility for extradition cases and was supervising Lord Justice for immigration and public law appeals. In 2017, at the age of fifty-nine, he became the youngest Lord Chief Justice to be appointed since 1958. In 2017 Lord Burnett received a Life Peerage and serves as an active crossbencher.

Lord Burnett is married to Caroline, with whom he has a son and a daughter. He has served as a Deputy Lieutenant in Essex since 2024.