Saturday 23 February 2013

The Peter Hitchens of The Left(ish)


On May 8, 1945, a misleadingly positive piece of government spin was sold to the British people. They were told that they had won the Second World War. The government dared to tell them after six years of crippling conflict, the destruction of homes, factories, the loss of the merchant shipping fleet, and the gold reserves, that Great Britain was somehow one of the winners.

And:

Perhaps somewhere in a parallel universe there is another 1990s Britain where the death of the Princess of Wales was mentioned in passing as an insignificant news event, like the death of a former sitcom star or the closing of a famous London boutique. The news was unimportant in the general scheme of things . . . but was probably worth just mentioning as it might be of trivial nostalgic interest for its own sake.

Instead, however, the sudden death of Diana was a massive news event, but only because of the way she had been built up over the previous years as one of the lead characters in the national soap opera. The nation embarked upon an utterly surreal week of very public mourning . . . It was a nationwide Nuremberg rally of contrived sentiment and displacement grief.

The wholly out-of-place lionisation of the Prime Minister who caused the Falklands War, whereas her Labour predecessor had successfully prevented an invasion, also demands to be challenged most robustly. As for the Brighton Bomb, her legend was burnished no end by her "miraculous" escape from an assassination attempt by an organisation with which she was in continuous contact while angrily insisting that she never spoke to it. Lady Tebbit should take up the matter with Lady Thatcher.

Lib-Lab London luvvies and self-congratulatory upper-middle-class satirists are not normally my thing. I suspect that John O'Farrell is a lot more pro-EU and a lot more anti-monarchist than I am. He certainly also has a long history as an activist in the cause of secular education. But just this once, good luck to him.

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