A reader, Margaret Stewart of Somerset, emails with an excellent suggestion. Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, is shortly to unveil a new public memorial to commemorate the victims of the slave trade, and highlight London’s role in their suffering. But wouldn’t it be more unifying, writes Mrs Stewart, if the memorial instead commemorated the role the Royal Navy played in ending slavery – thus focusing on the good our ancestors did, rather than the bad?
I agree. Mr Khan, though, expressly wishes us to focus on the bad. It is “essential”, he declares, to “commemorate and acknowledge the parts of our history some would rather forget”. Debbie Weekes-Bernard, the Deputy Mayor for Communities and Social Justice, adds that “London’s public spaces” must not “shy away or sugarcoat uncomfortable chapters from the past”.
I for one remain puzzled by this growing Left-wing mania for self-flagellation. Still, I’m not going to grumble. Instead, I plan to take advantage – by opening a Museum of National Self-Loathing.
This exciting new institution – to be based, naturally, in London – will be exclusively dedicated to highlighting all the shocking crimes Britain has committed in its shameful history. Obviously we face stiff competition in this field, from most of this country’s existing museums, art galleries and the National Trust. But we’re determined to outdo them. We will tell visitors not only that the British Empire was as bad as the Third Reich and that Winston Churchill was a genocidal racist. We will also tell them that Florence Nightingale was a serial killer, Jane Austen bombed Gaza, Shakespeare started apartheid, and Stonehenge is transphobic.
Entry will be £200. This may sound like a lot. But our target market of well-heeled progressives can easily afford it. And the feeling of moral superiority it will give them over the flag-waving gammon will make it seem a snip.
Why shouldn’t Farage visit Trump?
This week Nigel Farage made a brief trip to the USA to see Donald Trump. Naturally, Emily Maitlis, of the leading centrist podcast The News Agents, was determined to find out what he was playing at.
“Nigel Farage, what are you doing here?” she demanded to know, at the Republican National Convention in Wisconsin. “I thought you were giving all your time to Clacton now, as its new MP… At one point you said you wouldn’t be running in Clacton because you wanted to give your time to the US. But now you are the new Clacton MP, and are here in the US – just two weeks after getting elected…”
She is of course quite right to ask these crucial questions. After all, why on earth would the leader of a British political party want to talk to the man who is likely to be the next president of Britain’s closest ally? And anyway, what sort of person rushes to visit an old friend just because he’s been shot?
It’s all very mysterious. Thank goodness someone was there to hold Mr Farage to account.
At any rate, I urge The News Agents to expand this important line of inquiry – because there is an MP who I believe is spending even less time in his constituency. Ever since the election, the MP for Holborn and St Pancras appears to have spent much of his time flying around the world, hobnobbing with wealthy statesmen – not to mention enjoying free tickets to European football finals.
Rumour has it that the man doesn’t even live in his constituency, and has instead taken up residence in an extremely grand apartment in SW1 – while spending weekends at a lavish country house in Buckinghamshire. If true, this is shocking. The people of Holborn and St Pancras have just as much right to a full-time local MP as the people of Clacton. So when they see the man they elected swanning off abroad, I hope they don’t feel as if they’ve been had.
I gather that this jetsetter’s name is Sir Keir Starmer. Let’s hope our top podcasters hold him to account. If, that is, they ever catch up with him.
What the Tories can learn from Tony Benn
Few Tories, I suspect, view Tony Benn as a fount of unimpeachable wisdom. This is the man, after all, who once described the Chinese tyrant Mao Zedong – history’s most prolific mass murderer – as “the greatest man of the 20th century”, adding: “He made mistakes, because everybody does, but it seems to me that the development of the countryside and so on was very sensible.” This is the exact Left-wing equivalent of saying that Mussolini made the trains run on time.
All the same, Benn did have one piece of advice that all Tories should listen to. In his book Letters to My Grandchildren, published in 2010, he urged his readers never to give up fighting for what they believed in – because in politics, he said, “There is no final victory nor final defeat.”
These words are worth recalling, especially right now. Because one of the oddest aspects of modern political discourse is that we treat every victory as if it is final. After the Tories won by a landslide in December 2019, everyone vigorously agreed that they would be in power for a generation, and that Labour might never recover. Less than five years later, Labour has won by a landslide – and now everyone is vigorously agreeing that Labour will be in power for a generation, and that the Tories may never recover.
If the BBC wants an easy way to save money, it should stop hiring politicians and pundits to supply commentary on election nights, and ask some goldfish, instead. Their analysis would be much the same.
Way of the World is a twice-weekly satirical look at the headlines aiming to mock the absurdities of the modern world. It is published at 7am every Tuesday and Saturday