Robert Tombs

Today we are commemorating the 80th anniversary of D-Day – ‘Operation OVERLORD’ – with fitting ceremony and reverence, though, some polls suggest, without much understanding. Some confusion in the public mind about the precise meaning and importance of the Normandy landings is surely understandable. D-Day itself, 6 June, however vital, was the culmination of a long process, and the beginning, not the end, of a bloody and grinding struggle. Historical anniversaries, especially a round figure such as 80, are a good opportunity for education, and school children and television viewers will certainly emerge more knowledgeable, and often moved and impressed after this week.

Reparations have a troubled history, and rightly. The word itself, in its familiar sense, seems to have been a euphemism thought up by lawyers after the first world war. President Woodrow Wilson had promised a peace ‘without indemnities’. So no indemnities: ‘reparations’ instead. It sounded less objectionable. It was further agreed that liability should cover only demonstrable damage, not be punishment for the act of war itself – a remarkable and perhaps unprecedented concession by the victors to the vanquished (who had themselves recently imposed heavy indemnities on Russia, and before that on France). Yet reparations – relatively modest in total and largely unpaid – still became probably the most divisive and damaging aspect of the post-war Treaty of Versailles.

Kemi Badenoch has developed a habit of truth telling. This is risky in our climate of rigid cultural orthodoxy, for whose guardians ‘Truth is what you and people like you believe, and can compel others to accept,’ as the philosopher John Gray puts it. Those who tell truths that ‘you and people like you’ deny become targets. Ms Badenoch’s most recent foray into robust common sense occurred in a speech in the City, in which she said, among other things, that the changes that followed the Glorious Revolution of 1688, including the rule of law, led to a great expansion in financial services. She rejected the new orthodoxy that Britain’s ‘wealth and success’ were due to ‘colonialism’, ‘white imperialism’, ‘exploitation’ and ‘oppression.

Readers would doubtless find it hard to believe that the late Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh kidnapped and killed indigenous children while on a state visit to Canada in 1964. Yet this story circulated for years in Canada along with other horror stories of the rape, torture and murder of indigenous children at the hands of depraved priests and nuns. The bodies, it was said, were thrown into furnaces or secretly buried at dead of night. These accusations were linked to boarding schools run by various religious bodies first established in the 19th century and finally closed in the 1990s. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission was set up in 2008, and millions of dollars were given by the government to search for clandestine mass graves. None was found.

Once, museum curators saw their job as collecting, conserving and displaying to the public works of art or humbler objects that were beautiful, interesting and representative of a time and a place. Now many of them want to get rid of, or at least hide away, objects that they pronounce shameful. Cambridge University, under its present administrators, has been following the fashion. The Fitzwilliam Museum has taken down a painting by Stanley Spencer – ‘Love among the Nations’ – on the grounds that ‘Raised on the moral rightness of British imperial rule, Spencer imagines civilisation firmly in the West and savagery in its colonies’. So that’s you dealt with, Spencer.

A spoon may seem too homely for grand ceremony. It might even, in this sceptical and utilitarian age, seem slightly ridiculous. This prompts the question of how, or whether, we value ancient traditions and ceremonies whose original meanings and power are largely lost to us. And if we do value them, why? This particular spoon, undeniably, is a very special one: doubtless the world’s most important spoon, and certainly one of the most beautiful examples of that humble genus: silver-gilt, finely engraved with acanthus scrolls, decorated with pearls, and with its bowl strangely divided into two. It dates from the 12th century, and may have been used ever since Richard the Lionheart. It is the oldest piece of the coronation regalia.

I suppose most people regard the Suffragettes as the exemplary vindication of the right to carry out illegal direct action in a righteous cause. Speaking in support of Extinction Rebellion, Helen Pankhurst, a descendant of the Suffragette leader, said that both movements were equally ‘socially marginalised, made fun of, considered to be extremists, and legally silenced, and yet they stand up for justice in the way the Suffragettes did.’ Rather than pushing on a slowly opening door, they preferred to throw a brick through the window The Suffragette campaign was the first deliberately violent English political campaign since the 1840s, and this is part of its myth. Thankfully no one was killed during its campaign, other than the unfortunate Emily Davison.