Here:
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment