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on November 13, 2025
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. It's not just that the few remaining veterans of the Second World War are very much in the twilight of their years, or that the woman who led that generation through their darkest hours with her parents - Queen Elizabeth II - is gone.
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.
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. 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. They have little or no sense of national identity, ‘nation' being a dirty word. They are far more interested in identity politics, such as trans issues and questions of race and so-called white privilege. The only thing they really seem to care about is how they come across on social media - a kind of ‘does my virtue look big in this?' mentality. 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. 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. 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. Yesterday, it finally admitted a ‘lapse' in what it described as ‘our usual high editorial standards' for failing to challenge the prince on his claim that he is the victim of a ‘good old-fashioned establishment stitch up'.