In the fullness of time, which is to say the relentless churn of years that grinds even the mightiest to dust, we will lose the last of the VE-Day generation. Those stooped, medal-laden figures, their eyes still bright with the memory of a world saved, will shuffle off this mortal coil, leaving us to fumble with their legacy like children entrusted with a Fabergé egg. They stormed the beaches of Normandy, these men of the 50th Division, 25,000 strong, wading through surf and shrapnel to claw liberty from the jaws of tyranny.
They were not superheroes, though their deeds read like the stuff of myth. They were ordinary lads—bakers, clerks, farmhands—who did extraordinary things because history demanded it. And now, as their numbers dwindle to a whisper, we mark the 80th anniversary of VE Day with a mixture of reverence and shame, for we have squandered their gift in ways that would make them weep.
The shame is ours, but the blame, dear reader, must be laid at the feet of our current Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, a man so devoid of historical imagination he might as well be governing from a spreadsheet. Starmer, with his lawyerly precision and charisma of a damp flannel, presides over a Britain that seems to have forgotten the meaning of sacrifice.
His is a managerial reign, a beige dystopia where the grand sweep of history is reduced to a series of policy briefs and diversity quotas. One can almost picture him, in some Whitehall bunker, furrowing his brow over the latest migration figures, wondering how to spin the arrival of 10,000 undocumented young men—hale, hearty, and of fighting age—on England’s southern shores in the first five months of 2025 alone. Bed, board, and free gym memberships for all, courtesy of the taxpayer!
Try explaining that to the ghosts of Gold Beach, who fought not for handouts but for a nation worth defending. The contrast is grotesque. Those VE-Day lads, barely out of their teens, faced machine-gun nests and barbed wire, their only reward the chance to live another day. They did not ask for much—just a country that would remember them, that would honour their blood and sweat by building something enduring.
Instead, we offer them Starmer’s Britain, a land where the Home Office, under the steely gaze of Yvette Cooper, proposes visa crackdowns on migrants from Pakistan and Nigeria while simultaneously rolling out the red carpet for others, no questions asked. The asylum hotel bill, a cool £2 billion a year, is to be trimmed by a few hundred million, we’re told, as if fiscal prudence can mask moral bankruptcy. Meanwhile, the veterans, those who still draw breath, are left to navigate a healthcare system that treats them as an afterthought, their stories relegated to sepia-toned documentaries aired at inconvenient hours on BBC Four.
Let us pause to consider the absurdity. In the name of compassion, we fling open our borders to those who arrive with no papers, no history, no allegiance—only demands. The Home Office, that great engine of bureaucratic inertia, seems less concerned with vetting than with ensuring no one is offended in the process. Meanwhile, the memory of our VE-Day heroes is treated as a quaint relic, trotted out for anniversaries and then shelved until the next round of wreath-laying.
Allison Pearson, in her original cri de cœur, rightly asked how we went from Churchill to Starmer, from a titan to a nonentity. The answer is simple: we stopped believing in ourselves. Churchill, for all his flaws, understood that a nation is its people, its history, its shared resolve. Starmer, by contrast, seems to view Britain as a giant NGO, its purpose to absorb the world’s woes without complaint.
The VE-Day generation did not fight for this. They did not endure the unendurable so that their descendants could watch their country become a waystation for the rootless, its identity diluted to a bland multicultural broth. They fought for a Britain that knew what it was—a stubborn, idiosyncratic island that could stand alone if need be. Yet here we are, 80 years on, with Reform UK’s lonely crusade to ban “woke” flags from council buildings, as if a return to the Union Jack and St George’s Cross could stitch up the wounds of a nation unmoored. Even that modest proposal divides opinion, with Telegraph readers debating whether the Armed Forces flag is a worthy sacrifice for clarity. Clarity! As if we could find such a thing in Starmer’s Britain, where every policy is a hedge, every principle negotiable.
The tragedy is not just the loss of the veterans, though that is sorrow enough. It is the loss of what they stood for: a sense of duty, of pride, of something greater than the self. In their place, we have a government that prioritizes the optics of inclusivity over the substance of sovereignty. Starmer’s disdain for the past is not overt—he’s too cautious for that—but it seeps through in his every action. Why honour the dead when you can court the living, especially those who arrive in dinghies, their votes a distant but tantalizing prospect? The veterans, with their inconvenient tales of valour, are an embarrassment to a regime that prefers to look forward, never back.
And so, as we mark VE Day, let us mourn not just the men we lose but the Britain they knew. Let us mourn the certainty they fought for, the clarity they died for. Let us mourn, too, the fact that their sacrifice is now a footnote in a nation obsessed with its own reinvention. The VE-Day generation deserved better than to be patronized by a Prime Minister who cannot fathom their greatness. They deserved a country that would hold fast to their values, not one that trades them for a mess of pottage—or, worse, a gym membership. As the last of them fade, we are left with a question they would never have thought to ask: what was it all for? In Starmer’s Britain, the answer is as elusive as honour itself.