Treacherous Rhodes

I rarely regard student activity as news, and I tend to deprecate the increasingly widespread practice of treating it as such because, these days, so many of the people writing for the papers and for the major news sites are still students.

But I have stood in the Boer PoW cemetery in St Helena, and read the headstones of those boys of 14 and 15. As FW de Klerk puts it today, no one hated the British, and not least Cecil Rhodes, in quite the way that the Afrikaners did.

I am prepared to concede that the man who was formerly the journalist James Delingpole already knew that.

But to his readers, the readers that he has chosen, I suspect that this comes as rather more in the way of news. Either that, or in many cases they would consider it a badge of honour.

Hardly any of them are in, or have ever seen, Britain, and they still have their old Recognize Rhodesia buttons in the house somewhere.

They saw in those white supremacist colonial farmers, with their treason against the Crown, the twentieth-century heirs of their own Founding Fathers. They had a point.

Distinguishing them from the old regime in South Africa was more or less impossible, and they were profoundly proud of that fact.

That psychotically anti-British regime gave every assistance to Britain's alleged kith and kin in Rhodesia, who purported to abolish the monarchy.

Delingpole probably did know all of this. Even if he didn't, then it is not as if he has ever been, or will ever be, Prime Minister.

Yet the Prime Minister who gave fanatical support to the apartheid regime did not know these things, which in her case was perfectly believable and even probable.

Or else she found them as much a cause for commendation as did and do the writers, by no means only below the line, on Not Very Breitbart London.