Wasn’t Farage’s declaration of candidacy a grubby occasion? Obviously he had to stand in ‘the most patriotic town in Britain’. Most revealing was the speech he later delivered to his acolytes, in which he almost immediately jumped on to the subject of D Day commemoration but, of course, made it not about the veterans but about his own prejudices.

With revolting faux gravitas, he claimed that we should be thinking of those vets travelling to France whilst many of the young don’t know about the sacrifice of these brave men. That is nonsense. The twentieth century features big in the history curriculum and many schools take pupils on battlefield tours – in my school we did so every year, and we went to Auschwitz and Remembrance was a huge event, but that wasn’t what Farage was really talking about. He immediately claimed that teachers were telling kids to be ashamed of our history when really we should be proud, and his acolytes applauded! That was the real message – only Reform UK is truly patriotic and isn’t Britain great? There was then a complete non-sequitur and he moved on to that vital issue of women not having a willy. Nige wasn’t having any of this wokeness. Amazing how he shamelessly slipped from bogus solemnity to casual cheeky-chappie crowd-pleasing demagoguery without a second thought. Maybe not so amazing: it’s what he does.

Rabble rousers and statesmen

Here was Farage – the consummate rabble-rouser, using the veil of remembrance to spout his own nasty views and, of course, his supporters loved it, as do about 20% of the population. Commemorating our military heroes is not something they wish to share with the rest of us; they want to believe that they alone keep the flame of remembrance burning, whilst the rest of us don’t care. Sunak’s hasty exit from Normandy was, therefore, a gift to them. Rishi is a man with no sense of history and his utterances in Normandy were feeble and cliché-strewn, as one would expect. He is so limited as a communicator, and he is that bad that he doesn’t realise how bad he is. Farage, of course, is a talented orator, but he is vulgar and superficial, because that is his power base and he knows it. He’s a firebrand rather than a statesman – which Biden unquestionably is:  he gave a superbly crafted oration that was all about the veterans and other people and not about him, and he related the events of the past to those of today, which is as it should be, for remembrance should not primarily be about ‘temps perdu’ but rather about how we can honour the sacrifice of the fallen and make a better world.

It should also be about reconciliation between erstwhile enemies, but this is not what populists want. Do you think that Farage will tell his followers that his children are as German as they are English and that in another age they might have been manning the defences at Utah Beach. Of course not! That would confuse those who want from him the permission to fear and loathe and feel morally superior. And I fear that this is how remembrance has been corrupted in Britain – by some, I hasten to add, not all.

True reconciliation

I was a bit worried on 1 July 2016, when the first day of the battle of the Somme was remembered. This was so long ago that no veteran remained alive, and I felt this was the ideal moment to really kick start the reconciliation theme. To be fair the British and German navies had commemorated Jutland together, but why did the Bundeswehr and the British not come together at 6am at Serre? Why did British and German and French politicians not come together at Thiepval or in one of those beautiful little cemeteries? I suppose Brexit might have got in the way! Two years later the British government actually put on a service of thanksgiving to remember the blackest day for the German army when the Hindenburg line was breached – I mean really? For me this was a veritable WTF moment?  Whose mad idea was this? That was just cringe-worthy. You might just as well have a service of thanksgiving for the relief of Mafeking and the Battle of Waterloo.  

For Britain there has never been a moment like the day when Kohl and Mitterrand held hands at Verdun. That day needs to come, indeed it is vital if we are to return as a really partner in the project to bring Europe together because it’s only by working together that we can deal with the environment, immigration and the Russian threat – and China, well, and everything. And one small step would be to keep jingoistic patriotism out of remembrance – most veterans hate it, and they always did. If Sunak had been really clever, he’d have stayed and made a big thing out of the German presence, but it wouldn’t have occurred to him or to his SPADS to do that, such is their small-minded Anglocentric Brexity view on life. The desire to obsess about bygone grandeur must end: we have had enough of politicians who are à la recherche de temps perdu. We have to move on.

(This was written before the ‘We should have made peace with Hitler’ scandal reared its ugly head)

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