Donald trump

Live long enough and all your cherished memories of childhood will end up besmirched somehow. For many of us Boomers the 1970s are now nothing but a long, brownish and noisome stain. We might have expected Gary Glitter would be outed as a nonce and ditto the unequivocally foul Jimmy Savile. But come on, who would have thought there was a darker side to Benny Hill? His harmless and uplifting degradation of women was one of our regular delights, especially the bits where semi-naked babes chased him around parks, with a silly expression on his face, accompanied by fruity music. How we laughed. And so to find out now that all the time he was living a double life as a murderous IRA terrorist is kind of too much to bear.

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.