QUEENS HONOURS LIST: Two of Britain's football legends were rewarded today in a Birthday Honours List published on the day Euro 2004 kicks off.

Former West Ham and England player Trevor Brooking, now a senior FA official, gets a knighthood while Wales manager Mark Hughes, whose side came so close to qualifying for the tournament in Portugal, gets an OBE.

They head a list of sportsmen and women, showbusiness celebrities and leading figures from the arts, industry and the media receiving honours today.

Also sharing the limelight are more humble, hitherto unacclaimed people from what the Government describe as 'the sharp end' of society including a potato cultivator and an expert on bats.

In showbusiness, the snooty TV character Hyacinth Bucket would be delighted that the actress who plays her, Patricia Routledge, gets a CBE. And a CBE also goes to actor John Hurt.

There are OBEs for broadcaster Richard Whiteley, of Countdown fame, and for Angela Rippon, who became Britain's first female newsreader on national TV.

An MBE goes to veteran TV weatherman Michael Fish and to Pam Ayres, who became a TV hit reading her poems in a West Country burr.

Prolific novelist Jilly Cooper, known as The Queen of the Bonkbuster, gets an OBE.

There is also an OBE for Colin Parry who became a powerful voice for the victims of terror after his 12-year-old son Tim died with three-year-old Johnathan Ball when two IRA bombs ripped through Warring-ton town centre in 1993.

There are OBEs for two members of Cliff Richard's former backing group The Shadows, drummer Brian Bennett and rhythm guitarist Bruce Welch.

An OBE also goes to Shirley Conran, president of the Work Life Balance Trust, for services to equal opportunities.

Mrs Conran, formerly married to the design tycoon Sir Terence Conran, was the first women's editor of The Observer colour magazine and women's editor of the Daily Mail, for which she launched Femail.