Education minister of Punjab?

There is no ‘shoulders back, heads up' nowadays. No ‘keep calm and carry on'. Just ‘me, me, me' - as exemplified by research conducted earlier this year by The Times, in which just 11 per cent of Gen Z (young adults aged 18-27) said they would be willing to fight for their country. The other victims in Laos were 57-year-old American James Huston, two 19-year-old Australian women Holly Morton-Bowles and Bianca Jones and Danish friends Anne-Sofie Orkild Coyman, 20, and Freja Sorensen, 21. How many of them will play their part in ridding the world of a true evil? How many will stand up for what's good and right, regardless of their own sacrifice? How many will still rise to their feet, two years shy of their 100th birthdays, to salute the marching band? But for all the jollity, all the smiles and uplifting stories, I could not escape a nagging sense of sadness. A bitter feeling that it was all just a veneer, a performance rather than a true expression of solidarity. I have no doubt that his experience was by no means unusual. We wave our little flags today, pile the cream and jam on our scones, chink our teacups. But what that generation endured is hard to fathom, decades on. No technology, no phones, relatively basic medicine, no touchy-feely therapy sessions. It was do or die; you had no choice but to get on with it. The lack of self-awareness, the total entitlement, the utter selfishness: when you stop to think about it he's probably far more representative of modern British attitudes than his (comparatively) hard-working brother or father. Prince Harry is a classic case in point. He's older, of course, but his man-child mentality puts him firmly in this bracket. His contribution to the VE Day celebrations consisted of sitting down with a reporter working for the BBC, slagging off the Monarchy and the Government and whingeing about his own safety concerns. Forget that an entire generation ran towards Nazi Germany to protect HIS great-grandfather's Crown and HIS country; the real injustice here is that poor Harry doesn't get motorcycle outriders any more. Watching the Red Arrows, seeing the faces of the crowd, listening to the stories of the veterans, I felt a sense of wistful longing for a nation, a people, a spirit and, above all, a clarity of purpose that I fear no longer exists. And may never exist again. How they ever managed to go on to live anything even resembling a normal existence is a mystery to me. But somehow, they did. They knew the value of life, you see, understood how precious and precarious it is. They had survived: they owed it to those who did not to keep going. And don't get me wrong, it was wonderful to see so many people thronging the Mall, and all those street parties (in defiance of the gloomy weather). But for me, at any rate, the official celebrations were just tinged with… well, an inescapable sense of melancholy.