The Right Dishonourable

Even as a hedging sceptic without a party to call home, I still find it easy to forget how differently other people see the world. This amnesia is most obvious when I notice that somebody else differs not just on the topic at hand but on a big assumption that lies underneath.

A video by the YouTuber Leena Norms in which she ‘call herself out’ for political apathy reminded me of this. I’ve met Leena a handful of times and we’ve appeared on each others’ podcasts, including one time in which I explained what it was like to be a leave voter while not being a particularly typical leave voter. I think it’s fair to say she is leftwing and probably thinks of me as rightwing, if only mildly.

In one of the mildest scandals of recent weeks Dominic Raab was criticised for misunderstanding the origin of taking a knee in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. His counterparts in Labour have been photographed genuflecting, in a trend pioneered by the ever-keen Lib Dems.

The foreign secretary said the gesture “seems to be taken” from Game of Thrones, a fantasy series with grizzly deaths and lots of shagging. Given the series ended last May, this is a remarkably current reference for a sitting cabinet minister, but credit for this has been in short supply.

I’ve long suspected one of the problems with our politics is an excess of humanities graduates slouching through the corridors of power, as well as skulking outside with a microphone or waving placards on the other side of a heavy gate.

This intuition puts me in the same camp as Dominic Cummings, renegade eye doctor and occasional advisor to the prime minister. Unlike Cummings I lack a history degree from Oxford, but had I bothered to go university there was no risk of me studying a science. We are both humanities children criticising the humanities.

Before Edward Colston took a dip in Bristol harbour the prospect of problematic statues being removed in Britain was a mere glint in Afua Hirsch’s eye. Horatio Nelson, the one-armed, fornicating hero of Trafalgar, was her preferred target for his defence of slavery, but any old white man would probably have sufficed.

That at least seems to be the conclusion of other would-be iconoclasts, who are now compiling a map to “topple the racists”. Nelson features on it several times, naturally, along with Clive of India, Captain Cook, and Robert Peel. As well as removing statues the activists want to rename street names and buildings, including such oddities as the Horniman Museum round my way.