Donald trump

George III has not been well remembered on either side of the Atlantic. Despite reigning for almost 60 years, in Britain he is known, if at all, for losing the Thirteen Colonies and his madness in his later life. But in America, he is the villain of the national story; in Thomas Jefferson’s phrasing, the ‘Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant’. The Declaration of Independence is a lurid list of his alleged crimes against his American subjects. But 250 years after that document was signed by the Founding Fathers, George III has been going through a renaissance. In recent biographies, Andrew Roberts and Jeremy Black have argued that he was a much-misunderstood monarch.

I’m conscious that, just as the easiest way to lose an argument is to mention Hitler, so the easiest way to lose journalistic credibility is to invoke the 1930s. Yet the similarities to our own dismal decade are now too numerous to ignore. There is the same collection of morbid symptoms: the rise of strongmen, the collapse of the political centre, the intellectual organisation of political hatreds. Even more worryingly, there is the same sense of hurtling towards global conflagration. The similarities begin with the disintegration of the international order.

Sir Keir Starmer’s position on the US bombing of Iran is inglorious, but one should suspend disapproval to understand how he must have been thinking politically. His party had just lost the Gorton and Denton by-election to the Greens (backed by a strong Muslim vote). His leadership had never seemed weaker. So he calculated that he could not unequivocally back the actions of Israel and Donald Trump. He will have had the Iraq war in mind, particularly the role of the attorney general. Over Iraq, the then attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, was criticised for seeming to change his legal advice to Tony Blair in order to legitimise British participation in the invasion. Sir Keir’s Attorney General, Lord Hermer, is much more central to the administration than an AG ever should be.

A friend met Mary Wilson on the Isles of Scilly, where she and her husband, Harold, had a home. She confided in him that Harold, now in the grip of senile dementia, was slipping away from her; and she felt the lonelier because in the eyes of the world his achievements as prime minister were slipping away as well. My friend rehearsed with her the list: the Open University, etc. Then he added this: there is a kind of achievement in high office which by its very nature is unlikely to burn brightly in the world’s imagination after a leader has gone, but is no less luminous for being forgotten. I mean (he said) declining to do something foolish. On behalf of our country (he said), your husband politely declined Washington’s invitation to join the Vietnam war.